session, where the work was finalised and the Model Law was adopted on 21 June 1985. In particular I remember that he, in despite of his hesitations, in the spirit of compromise accepted the provision in Art. 1(3)(c) of the Model Law according to which an arbitration is international and thus the Model Law is applicable, if the parties have expressly agreed that the subject matter of the arbitration agreement relates to more than one country.

On its 31^>st session, which was held in 1998, i.e. forty years after the adoption of the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (Convention), UNCITRAL held a special commemorative New York Convention Day in order to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Convention. Speeches were first given by Professor Pieter Sanders and Dr. Ottoarndt Glossner who had participated in the diplomatic conference that adopted the Convention. In addition leading experts, among those of course Professor Lebedev, gave reports on matters relating to the significance of the Convention; its promotion, enactment and application; the interplay between the Convention and other international legal texts on international commercial arbitration (such as the Model Law and the European Convention on International Commercial Arbitration) and legal issues that were not covered by the Convention. In the reports, various suggestions were made for presenting to UNCITRAL some of the problems identified in practice so as to enable UNCITRAL to consider whether any work by UNCITRAL would be desirable and feasible. The topic of Professor Lebedev’s report was “Court Assistance with Interim Measures”. When the Model Law was amended in 2006 the most important amendments concerned the interim measures.

The Commission considered at its 31^>stsession that it would be useful to engage in such a consideration of possible future work at its 32^>th session in 1999 and requested the Secretariat to prepare, for that session a note that would serve as a basis for the consideration of the Commission.

At its 32^>nd session in 1999 the Commission had before it the requested note. The Commission generally considered that the time had come to assess the extensive and favourable experience with national enactments of the Model Law as well as the use of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules and the UNCITRAL Conciliation Rules, and to evaluate in the universal forum of the Commission the acceptability of ideas and proposals for improvement of arbitration laws, rules and practices. The Commission entrusted the work to one of its working groups, which it named Working Group on Arbitration (later renamed, Working Group on Arbitration and Conciliation; Working Group II Arbitration and Conciliation and now called Working Group II Dispute Settlement) and decided that the priority items for the Working Group should be conciliation, requirement of written form for the arbitration agreement, enforceability of interim measures of protection, and possible enforceability of an award that had been set aside.

The Working Group prepared the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Conciliation (2002), the amendments to the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (1985) adopted in 2006, the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules (as revised in 2010), the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules (with new Article 1(4) as adopted in 2013), the UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency in Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration (effective date 1 April 2014), the Convention on Transparency in Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration, also referred to as the “Mauritius Convention on Transparency” (New York, 2014) and the UNCITRAL Notes on Organizing Arbitral Proceedings (2016). Since 2015 the Working Group has considered the topic of enforceability of international commercial settlement agreements resulting from conciliation.