Gennadii Tsirat: Books and Papers on Cross-Border Litigation and Arbitration

Cross-border disputes | JVS Law

Gennadii Tsirat has taught international commercial arbitration at the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv since 1998, and international civil procedure alongside it. The textbooks from those courses are what a generation of Ukrainian lawyers — including some now sitting as judges and arbitrators — learned the subject from.

The writing itself has never been listed in one place. Six academic papers sit on this site as separate pages, the books each have their own, and the conference work is a PDF nobody links to. This page is the index: what exists, what each piece is for, and — the part that matters most — where the law has moved since it was written.

International Civil Procedure (Yurincom Inter, 2026, 448 pp., ISBN 978-966-667-881-5). The current one. International jurisdiction, the legal position of foreigners in proceedings, service of documents and the taking of evidence abroad, recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. Written from the enforcement end rather than the theory end, which is why practitioners use it more than students do.

International Commercial Arbitration (2019). The course he has taught since 1998, summarised in print twice — in 2002 and again, far more fully, in 2019. Arbitration set against litigation across the aspects that actually decide a cross-border commercial dispute: ad hoc against institutional, universal institutions against specialised ones, the standing and structure of the tribunal.

International Civil Litigation: Current State and Prospects of International Unification (2014). The monograph behind his doctorate. It traced unification at the regional level — the Americas, Europe, the post-Soviet states — and within the Hague Conference on Private International Law, and placed Ukraine inside those processes. Not a practitioner’s manual; the map that the later textbooks were built on.

Civil Procedure in Ukraine — the Ukrainian national monograph in the International Encyclopaedia for Civil Procedure (Wolters Kluwer), written with Anna Tsirat since 2011; the current edition on the publisher’s site is dated May 2019. This is the one foreign counsel reach for first, because it describes the whole system in one place and in English.

A short English brief. Before the encyclopaedia entry there is a twenty-page orientation on how cross-border litigation actually works in Ukraine — jurisdiction, service, evidence, enforcement — written for foreign counsel and investors who need the shape of the system rather than its detail: International Civil Procedure in Ukraine (PDF, in English).

Each is on this site in full, with the original PDF attached.

• Jurisdiction in bilateral treaties on legal assistance — which state’s courts may hear the dispute at all. Ukraine has such treaties with some thirty states, most of them regulating jurisdiction, and counsel reaches for them last.
• Bilateral legal aid treaties as unification — the same instruments read as a system: what is served, taken and enforced under them, and why what works with one state fails with another.
• The Hague Conventions on service and evidence — the two questions that blow more deadlines each year than any point of substantive law.
• Recognition and enforcement under the 2005 Hague Choice of Court Convention — what the clause signed years earlier is actually worth when the debtor’s assets are elsewhere.
• The legal position of foreigners in civil proceedings — security for costs, legal aid and access, the subject of the 1980 Hague Convention that reached Ukraine decades after the paper was written.
• Interim measures in international commercial arbitration — the scenario that makes winning pointless: the respondent strips its assets while the tribunal deliberates.

Application of Article II(3) of the 1958 New York Convention in Ukrainian court practice — his paper at the 5th Pobirchenko International Arbitration Readings (4 October 2018). It works through the procedural routes by which Ukrainian courts decide whether an arbitration agreement is valid, and argues that several of them go beyond what the Convention and the Law on International Commercial Arbitration allow. This is the paper to read before defending a clause in a Ukrainian court.

National correspondent of Ukraine to UNCITRAL (CLOUT), 2017–2022. CLOUT is the system UNCITRAL built in 1988 to collect and publish court decisions and awards applying its texts — above all the New York Convention and the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, on which Ukraine’s own 1994 Law is based. The correspondent’s job is to observe Ukrainian court and arbitral practice under those instruments and report it. The designation is recorded here.

Saying this plainly is the point of the page. The papers date from 2013–2014 and the analysis holds, but several of the instruments they describe have since changed status — and the procedural code they cite was rewritten.

• The codes were renumbered. Law No. 2147-VIII rewrote commercial, civil and administrative procedure at once, in force from 15 December 2017 — what that did, and did not do, for cross-border cases.
• The 2005 Hague Choice of Court Convention is now in force for Ukraine — since 1 August 2023, which is what the 2013 paper was arguing towards: the current position.
• The 1980 Hague Access to Justice Convention entered into force for Ukraine on 1 August 2026 — legal aid in 28 states and no security for costs merely for being foreign: what it covers and where it stops.
• The arbitration rules moved too. The ICC text is the 2021 edition and the expedited threshold has shifted twice since; the ICAC Rules were amended in 2025 — which rules to name in the contract.

Compiled in August 2026. Bibliographic details are as published; the status of the instruments is stated as at that date, and instruments change faster than books do — check the linked pages before relying on anything here. The papers are published on this site in full and free of charge.