On 8 June 2026, the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, delivered a lecture in Courtroom No. 1 of the UK Supreme Court on the converging Indian and English approaches to commercial dispute resolution. it carried a doctrinal proposition that ought to interest anyone designing dispute architecture for India's new generation of trade corridors – doctrine of processus conveniens, by which the modern commercial actors focus not on the most convenient forum, but on the most appropriate process litigation, arbitration, or mediation to resolve the dispute, within a polycentric framework of justice.
The doctrine arrives at a propitious moment. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between India and Oman, signed in Muscat on 17–18 December 2025, is one of the best trade agreements India has signed in the last twenty years for relevance and commercial fertility. It is structurally better than the India–Australia ECTA in seven respects, at least, and a careful reading of the PIB's explanatory note suggests that the seven understate the case.
India secures one hundred per cent duty-free market access across 98.08 per cent of Oman's tariff lines, covering 99.38 per cent of India's export value, from the first day of the agreement's entry into force. Oman undertakes broad and deep services commitments across 127 sub-sectors, characterised as “GATS/Best FTA-plus.” The intra-corporate transferee ceiling is raised from the customary 20% to 50%. For the first time in any of India's free trade agreements, a defined category of professionals accounting, engineering, medical, IT, education, construction and consulting services receives binding mobility commitments. Lawyers are conspicuously absent from that list; the chapter does not explain the omission. For the first time in any FTA, mobility commitments extend to manufacturing and non-services sectors. Indian pharmaceutical exports approved by USFDA, EMA, UK MHRA or Australia's TGA receive ninety-day marketing authorisation in Oman without prior inspection. Halal certification systems receive mutual acceptance. India's National Programme for Organic Production is recognised.
The CEPA has the substance the Indo-Australian ECTA in its present form does not have. It is broader, deeper, more immediate in effect, more honest about labour movement, and more sophisticated in regulatory cooperation. So far, so straightforwardly good.
The dispute settlement chapter is the same boilerplate state-to-state template the ECTA contains, drafted to the inherited WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding model, with no substantial case under any of India's nine free trade agreements in the decades since the first of them was signed.
The CJI's London framing recasts the mismatch. The CEPA's chapter twenty-one is not just the wrong forum for the disputes the agreement will generate; it prescribes a single process — state-to-state panel adjudication for a population of disputes that, by any honest reading, calls for several. Processus conveniens asks which process fits which dispute. Chapter twenty-one asks none of these questions. It prescribes one process and is structurally incapable of asking the prior question.
Take the categories. Pharmaceutical regulatory equivalence, suppose an Indian generic manufacturer approved by Australia's TGA submits a dossier in Muscat whose stability profile derives from a facility different from the TGA-approved facility. Ninety-day pathway or longer route? Inspection to TGA standards, Omani standards, or some hybrid? Halal and organic certification — suppose a previously accepted halal certifier is delisted by an Omani administrative instrument, and an in-transit Indian consignment becomes immediately non-compliant. Resolution forum? Defined-professional mobility — suppose an Indian chartered accountant takes employment in Muscat; an Indian-trained finance professional with adjacent qualifications follows; the Omani regulator distinguishes the two. Standing? Engineering and infrastructure — suppose an Indian EPC contractor at the Sohar industrial port (Sohar, Duqm and Salalah being the named gateways through which India proposes to reach the wider GCC and East African market) falls into dispute with the Omani principal over a FIDIC variation order. Forum?
None of these is a WTO-panel dispute. None responds well to a generalist commercial arbitration in Singapore, Dubai or the DIFC, conducted by a roster on which neither contracting state's bar is well represented. Each is, however, a candidate for a mediated proceeding before a panel with sectoral competence — pharmaceutical regulation, halal certification, professional credentialing, engineering construction — and, if mediation fails, an arbitration panel drawn from the same roster. The engineering case has a further refinement: a standing Dispute Resolution Board (DRB) on the FIDIC model, sitting throughout the construction or offtake period, issuing interim binding decisions subject to final review. Both jurisdictions are now moving, in different idioms, towards the same polycentric position the doctrine of processus conveniens describes.
This author has, in earlier work on the India–Australia corridor, sketched the institutional response. A federated mediation architecture, anchored at the International Arbitration and Mediation Centre Hyderabad (IAMCH) at the Indian end, networked with the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre as the neutral seat, and federated with a counterpart institution in the partner jurisdiction. Its six design features: sectoral specialisation, dual-jurisdictional competence, the Singapore Convention enforcement spine, light institutionalisation, soft jurisdiction over mixed and investor-state matters, and standing Dispute Resolution Boards on the FIDIC model for long-cycle infrastructure and off-take contracts. The architecture is processus conveniens in institutional form: a way of matching each dispute to its proper process, and each process to its proper panel.
There is also a dimension no serious corridor dispute architecture can ignore. The CEPA facilitates the temporary movement of natural persons — including employees and consultants. Add to them the artisans, sub-contractors, domestic and care workers under labour-supply arrangements, and the rapidly growing class of remote and platform professionals who deliver services across the corridor without ever crossing it. The agreements that move them contain no dispute architecture for the persons who actually move. A contractual service supplier in Muscat whose engagement is terminated in breach; a Coimbatore software professional unpaid for six months of work delivered online; a Rusayl Industrial City contract welder injured on site; a domestic worker with wages withheld, none has a usable forum under the CEPA, and none is large enough to arbitrate. This would also facilitate ethnic diversity in the ADR professional cohort. The problem of lack of ethnic diversity has been pointed out in a in a 'Mapping ADR' blog of Jindal Global Law School: “… ethnic diversity poses a significant concern with tribunals being dominated by a homogenous group of individuals who are “pale, male, and stale”.
An empirical study confirmed this phenomenon in Washington & Lee Schools of Law Scholarly Commons by Prof Susan D Frank et al The corridor's quiet equity deficit is not, in fact, quiet at all.
The Oman case adds a fact of timing. Oman acceded to the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, the Singapore Convention, on 10 March 2026. The Convention enters into force for Oman on 10 September 2026. The enforceability of mediated settlements reached in the corridor is, on the Omani side, a matter of months away. India has signed the Convention but has not yet ratified, a position the medium-term policy direction is widely expected to resolve.
The architecture's institutional cost is modest. No new treaty. No new secretariat. The doctrine, after the CJI's London framing, is no longer in want of invention. What it requires is a coordinated decision by three institutions — IAMCH at the Indian anchor, a federated counterpart at the Omani end, and a neutral-seat institution such as DIAC, HKIAC or the DIFC to network their existing capacity through a federation memorandum.
The London lecture closed with the observation that the true measure of a mature legal system lies not only in its ability to adjudicate disputes but in its capacity to help parties resolve them. Mediation, the CJI added, is no sign of weakness; it is the mark of commercial sophistication, strategic maturity, and financial prudence. The CEPA's dispute settlement chapter is what the inherited template required. The architecture the CEPA actually needs is what the CJI's doctrine, the December 2025 agreement, and the September 2026 entry into force of the Singapore Convention for Oman together demand.
Australia was the first corridor. Oman is the second. The federation is being designed for both. As of last week, the doctrine is in the public square.
Author is a Senior Advocate of the Madras High Court of Judicature, practising in International Energy Law, ECTA/CECA Trade Law, Critical Minerals, Oil and Gas, and Cross-Border Arbitration and Mediation. Views are personal.