Arbitration
The recourse to arbitration is rooted in the usage of the international community of traders, as well as in all the civilizations : Mediterranean, Eastern or Western. Nowadays, arbitration is the most natural way for the settlement of commercial disputes, thanks to its undeniable advantages : flexibility, confidentiality, expeditiousness, and reasonable costs. Besides, the qualification of arbitrators and their specific vision to the dispute, as a punctual and temporary litigation rather than an irreversible confrontation, are factors that ensures to parties a satisfying settlement to the dispute, keeping the door open to the continuation of their business relations. This is, often, more important than recovery.

Tunisian law has provided a very flexible system to arbitration, which main objective is to ensure a maximum validity to the arbitral agreement, and an optimal efficiency to the award decided on the basis of this agreement. The Tunisian system offers to parties the opportunity to choose the law applicable to the subject matter of the arbitration, the law applicable to the procedure followed by arbitrators who may themselves shape it, and the law applicable even to the arbitration convention itself.

In addition, many attractive fiscal advantages are provided by the law for businessmen. All the legal transactions (contracts, conventions…) related to arbitration, as well as the arbitral awards, are exempted from registry fees, which ordinary rate is 5%. Such important amounts are largely sufficient to cover arbitrators and procedure fees, notably when the Tunis Center for Conciliation and Arbitration is appointed to conduct the arbitration. In this case, the arbitration cost does never exceed this limit. This is why it is worthy to affirm that the Center's arbitral procedure is in fact free of charge.

Conciliation
Conciliation is the principal ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution) : it is a peaceful way to settle litigations, that need the intervention of a third party in charge of trying to reach a solution accepted by parties. Indeed, the conciliator's mission is to bring positions closer. He or she cannot impose a solution on parties, even though it seems the fairest one.

Conciliation is a pure conventional procedure, as it does not have a pre-established legal framework. Therefore, parties have the freedom to organize it as they wish. However, in the event of recourse to an arbitration and conciliation institution, such as the Tunis Center for Conciliation and Arbitration, parties save their efforts for the elaboration of a conciliation procedure "code", as the Center's Rules deal with it.

The Conciliation procedure is characterized by its extreme flexibility and perfect confidentiality, as the conciliator's proposals and the parties' counter-proposals are not disclosed to any persons other the conciliator and parties. Among the advantages of the Center's conciliation procedure, the fact that the conciliator cannot be appointed an arbitrator later in the same litigation, which ensures the impartiality of the arbitration.