Sir Bernard Rix is a retired Lord Justice of Appeal to twenty years experience in the English Commercial Court and the English Court of Appeal. He is a member of the HKIAC Panel of Arbitrators, a member of the MOOGAS Panel of International Arbitrators and Mediators, has been appointed to the Cayman Islands Court of Appeal and to the Singapore International Commercial Court, and is an ADR Group accredited mediator. In addition, he has been appointed as Professor of International Commercial Law at Queen Mary, University of London.
As a member of the Court of Appeal, he has delivered a wide range of judgments on arbitration, aviation, banking, insurance and reinsurance, private and public international law, oil and gas, sale of goods and shipping disputes. They include significant judgments such as Dallah v. Government of Pakistan [2010] Bus LR 384 on international enforcement of arbitration awards (upheld by the Supreme Court), Kuwait Airways v. Iraqi Airways (Nos. 4 and 5) [2002] 2 AC 883 (parts 22-35 and 43-54 of the Court of Appeal judgment, upheld by the House of Lords) on international law, and R (Al-Skeini) v. Secretary of State for Defence [2007] QB 140 (upheld by the House of Lords) on the jurisdictional scope of the European Convention of Human Rights, and Yukos v. Rosneft (No 2) [2013] 1 All ER (Comm) 327, on the act of state doctrine.
At the Bar he specialised in international commercial and arbitral disputes as a barrister and latterly as an arbitrator, and also appeared in the courts of Singapore and Hong Kong. He was counsel in Mareva Compania Naviera SA v. International Bulkcarriers SA [1975] 2 Lloyd’s Rep 509, the eponymous origin of the “Mareva injunction”, now called a freezing order; in I Congreso del Partido [1983] 1 AC 244 (HL) which introduced the commercial exception to English law’s previous absolute doctrine of sovereign immunity; and in Channel Tunnel Group Ltd v. Balfour Beatty Construction Ltd [1992] 1 QB 656 (CA, affirmed in the House of Lords) concerning the operation of the arbitration clause in the contract for construction of the Channel Tunnel.
