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International Arbitration Forum

Privacy Notice

Effective 26 October 2026 · Terms of Use

International Arbitration Forum Inc. ("the Forum", "we") runs arbitration.org, a non-profit research platform for international arbitration. This notice explains what personal data we handle, why, and what your rights are. It is written to meet the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and comparable laws elsewhere; we apply it to everyone, wherever they are.

1. Who is responsible

The controller is International Arbitration Forum Inc., a Delaware non-stock, non-profit corporation recognised as a public charity under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, with its registered office at 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958, United States. For anything in this notice, write to info@arbitration.org.

2. In short

  • You can read the whole site, search the awards and run a conflict check without an account and without telling us who you are.
  • We set no advertising or analytics cookies and we do not sell or rent personal data. The only cookie is the session cookie that keeps you signed in once you have an account.
  • Names you enter in the conflict checker and questions you put to the research assistant are processed to produce the result and are not stored by us.
  • The awards database and the arbitrator profiles contain names of people who appear in published arbitral awards and court decisions: arbitrators, counsel, experts and party representatives. Section 6 explains how we handle that data and how to ask for a correction.

3. Accounts

An account is optional. It raises the daily limit of the research assistant and will let arbitrators manage their own profile. When you sign in we store:

  • From an emailed link: your email address and the date you joined.
  • From LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft or Apple: the identifier the provider gives us for your account, your name, your email address and, where the provider supplies one, the address of your profile photo. We ask for nothing more: no contacts, calendar, messages, posts or files. The provider tells you what it shares before you continue, and its own privacy policy governs what it does on its side.
  • Usage counters: how many research questions you have asked today, kept for 26 hours.

Legal basis: performance of our terms with you (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). We keep the account until you delete it; you can do that yourself from your account page, which also lets you download what we hold. We may delete accounts that have not been used for three years after writing to the address on file.

4. The research assistant and the conflict checker

IAF Research. Your question, the passages of published awards that match it and, for a follow-up, the earlier exchange are sent to Anthropic PBC (United States), whose Claude models write the answer. Anthropic processes this under its commercial API terms: it does not use the content to train its models and retains it only for a limited period for abuse monitoring. We do not store your questions or the answers; we keep only a count of questions and tokens for budgeting. If you are not signed in, a one-way hash of your network address, which cannot be reversed to the address itself, limits the number of free questions and is discarded after 26 hours.

IAF Conflict Check. The names you enter are matched against the published awards while the page is built and are not written to any log or database. If you share the link to a result, the names are in the link; the link is yours to share or not.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in providing the research tools you have asked for (Article 6(1)(f)), and your consent where you choose to use them.

5. Visiting the site

  • Statistics. We count visits with a hash of a daily random value, your network address and browser type. The hash changes every day and cannot be turned back into your address; no address, cookie or identifier is stored.
  • Technical logs. Our hosting provider, IONOS, keeps standard server logs (including network addresses) for a short period for security and fault-finding. Error logs of the site itself may contain a network address and are kept briefly.
  • Cookies. Only the session cookie for signed-in members. Because we use no cookies that need consent, there is no cookie banner.
  • Email. If you write to us, we keep the correspondence for as long as needed to answer and, where it concerns a correction or a legal matter, as a record.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running a secure, working website (Article 6(1)(f)).

6. People named in the awards database and the arbitrator profiles

The awards database holds arbitral awards, decisions and court judgments that are already public: published by the arbitral institutions (ICSID, the PCA and others), by courts, or by the parties and their counsel. These documents name the arbitrators, counsel, experts, tribunal secretaries and party representatives involved. From them we compile, partly with AI, case summaries, a record of who appeared in which case, arbitrator profiles and the conflict checker. The arbitrator directory also contains profiles that arbitrators have given us themselves, and a curated list of leading arbitrators compiled from public professional sources.

We process this information in the public interest of transparency in international arbitration and for research and archiving purposes (Articles 6(1)(f), 85 and 89 GDPR). We do not process special categories of data, and we do not use it for any decision about the people concerned. Each entry links to the page of the public document it comes from, so that it can be checked.

Your rights over this data. If you are named in the database you may ask us to correct an error, to add information to your profile, or to remove a profile entry; write to info@arbitration.org with the page concerned. We correct errors promptly. Because the underlying documents are public records of judicial and arbitral proceedings, we will generally not remove a person's name from a published award or from the record of their appearance in a case, and the right to erasure does not apply to that extent (Article 17(3)(a) and (d)); we will consider every request on its facts. Statements of an arbitrator's own practice shown on a profile come from that arbitrator's website or from the arbitrator, and we remove or update them on request.

7. Who else sees the data

We share personal data only with the service providers that run the site for us, bound by data-processing terms:

  • IONOS — hosting of the website, its database and email delivery.
  • Anthropic PBC — generates the research assistant's answers and the AI case summaries from the public documents, as described in section 4.
  • GitHub, Inc. — runs the automated jobs that convert and index the public documents; no account data is sent to it.
  • LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft and Apple — only when you choose to sign in with them, and only to confirm who you are.

We disclose personal data to others only when the law requires it or to protect the rights or safety of the Forum or of others. We never sell personal data or share it for advertising.

8. International transfers

The Forum is in the United States and the providers above operate in the United States and the European Union. Where data of people in the EU, the UK or Switzerland is transferred to the United States, this is done under the EU–U.S. Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified, or under the European Commission's standard contractual clauses (and the UK addendum) in the processing terms we hold with each provider.

9. How long we keep data

  • Account data: until you delete the account, or three years after its last use.
  • Research questions and conflict-check names: not stored.
  • Daily usage counters: 26 hours. Visit statistics: aggregated daily counts only, kept indefinitely; they identify no one.
  • Correspondence: as long as needed for the matter, then deleted; records of corrections to the database are kept.
  • The awards database and the records compiled from it: kept as a permanent public archive, subject to section 6.

10. Your rights

Under the GDPR and similar laws you may ask us for access to your personal data, correction, deletion, restriction of processing, a copy in a portable format, and you may object to processing based on our legitimate interests. Where processing rests on consent you may withdraw it at any time. Write to info@arbitration.org; we answer within one month. We may ask you to confirm your identity. You may also complain to the data-protection authority of the country where you live or work.

Members can see, download and delete their account data directly on the account page.

11. Children

The site is for professionals and students of arbitration. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly hold data of anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us data, write to us and we will delete it.

12. Security

The site is served over HTTPS; account sign-in uses one-time links or the providers' own sign-in, so we hold no passwords; the data we hold is limited to what is described here; and access to the administration of the site is restricted to the Forum's officers. No system is perfectly secure, and we will inform you and the competent authority of a breach that is likely to put your rights at risk, as the law requires.

13. Changes to this notice

We will post any change on this page with a new effective date and, for material changes affecting members, write to the email address on their account.

14. Contact

International Arbitration Forum Inc. · 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958, United States · info@arbitration.org