The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) is organizing a Colloquium on contractual networks and other forms of inter-firm cooperation on 25-26 March 2019 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (USA).
The Colloquium will analyse the relevance of contractual networks to UNCITRAL work on developing an enabling legal environment for Micro Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs). As you may already well note, contractual networks was proposed as a possible future work by UNCITRAL on alternative forms of organization to corporate-like models in MSMEs with the expectation of providing an opportunity to organize cooperation between business without a requirement for a legal entity to be formed and that work on such networks would complement the work on the UNLLO under.
In order to get a solid understanding of contractual networks and their objectives, the Colloquium will also discuss other legal tools in both civil and common law jurisdictions that achieve similar goals to those networks. The conclusions of the Colloquium should assist UNCITRAL in evaluating the desirability of taking up work in this area in the future.
The Colloquium will be conducted on an informal basis and will be open to experts from government, the private sector, academia and the non-profit sector. Interpretation in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) will be available. The colloquium will be followed by the thirty-second session of Working Group I on 27 to 29 March. Attendance at the Working Group will be restricted to representatives of Member and Observer States and those intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations invited to participate.
A registration form is available on the UNCITRAL website alongside with the programme (https://uncitral.un.org/en/events/25-26.03.2019) and should be completed and sent to the address indicated on the form, as soon as possible and no later than 15 March 2019. Upon receipt of the completed registration form, participants will be sent confirmation of their registration, alongside with instructions for gaining access to the UNHQ in New York.