§ 9-9-56.Recourse against arbitration award; criteria for setting aside award; time for making application to set aside

This section answers a question that decides whether a losing party in international arbitration gets a real second chance in court: not much of one, and only along a narrow path. Setting aside the award is the only route to judicial recourse against it, and the grounds for doing so form a closed list, not an open invitation to relitigate the merits.

The first set of grounds requires the challenging party to prove something went wrong: a party lacked capacity, or the arbitration agreement itself was not valid under the law the parties chose to govern it or, absent that choice, under the law of Georgia; the challenger did not get proper notice of the arbitrator’s appointment or the proceedings, or otherwise could not present its case; the award strayed outside what was submitted to arbitration in the first place (though a court can sever just the excess portion if it is separable); or the tribunal’s makeup or the procedure followed departed from what the parties agreed — unless that agreement conflicted with a provision of the code the parties cannot depart from — or, absent an agreement, from the code’s own rules. A second, narrower set lets the court act on its own finding — that the dispute was not the kind subject matter can be arbitrated at all, or that the award conflicts with United States public policy.

Timing is unforgiving: the application has to be filed within three months of receiving the award, or, if a request was made under Code Section 9-9-55, within three months of the tribunal disposing of that request. The court is not limited to an all-or-nothing choice, either — if a party asks, it can pause the setting-aside proceedings to give the tribunal room to resume the case or take other action that eliminates the problem, rather than throwing out the award outright. And when neither party is domiciled or based in Georgia, the parties can, by a written agreement that specifically references this subsection, narrow the available grounds further, though they cannot waive the two grounds a court can raise on its own — non-arbitrability and public policy.