I have been asked to share my experience with the establishment of an international commercial court in Singapore, with a view that this might hopefully kick-start a wider discussion on whether the time has come for an international construction court to be developed. I should make an obvious point at the outset. The Singapore International Commercial Court will have a number of quite unique features that give it a distinctly international flavour. But it remains a court that is part of the Singapore Judiciary and is funded out of the Singapore national budget. In that sense it is a quite distinct creature from a real international court such as is contemplated by the construction law community. Nonetheless our experience may yield some useful thoughts.

I think if we just briefly look back into the second half of the 20th Century, what we experienced was an explosive increase in connectivity and consequently, what has been termed the “accelerated flattening of the world”. The exponential growth of international trade gave rise to a corresponding increase in transnational commercial disputes. The problem was that many legal systems struggled to evolve quickly enough to deal with these changes: these systems had been designed primarily to manage intra-jurisdictional and domestic disputes, and were perhaps not especially well-suited for handling transnational disputes. There were also difficulties in designing an international agreement for the enforcement of