Prof. E Eugene Clark was nominated by President Huang Jin, in his role as President and Chairperson of the China Society of Private International Law (CSPIL), to be an observer at the 50th session of the United Nation's Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) E-commerce Working Group IV, held on 10-14 Nov, 2014 in Vienna, Austria.

UNCITRAL, which became officially operative in 1968, has made a major contribution to creating the legal infrastructure to facilitate global trade and economic development. This has been done by coordinating the work of multiple organizations and encouraging cooperation and consensus building among them; promoting widespread participation in the development of conventions, model laws, legislative guides and other instruments. Examples of Conventions include:

·       UNCITRAL Model Law on InternationalCommercial Arbitration (1985)

·       Model Law on International Credit Transfers (1992)

·       UNCITRAL Model Law on Procurement of Goods, Construction andServices (1994)

·       UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce (1996)

·       Model Law on Cross-border Insolvency (1997)

·       UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures (2001)

·       UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Conciliation(2002)

Examples of Conventions include:

·       the Convention on the Limitation Period in theInternational Sale of Goods (1974)

·       the United Nations Convention on the Carriageof Goods by Sea (1978)

·       the United NationsConvention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (1980)

·       the United Nations Convention on International Bills of Exchangeand International Promissory Notes (1988)

·       the United Nations Convention on the Liability of Operators ofTransport Terminals in International Trade (1991)

·       the United Nations Convention on Independent Guarantees andStand-by Letters of Credit (1995)

·        Model Legislative Provisions on Privately FinancedInfrastructure Projects

UNCITRAL facilitates international trade by working towards the achievement of a uniform interpretation and application of international conventions and uniform laws related to international trade; and collecting and disseminating information about modern legal developments, including case law.

The UNCITRAL Commissions meets once a year to adopt text with the preparatory work being done in various working groups. Prof. Clark participated in the E-commerce Working Group IV which dealt with the unification of laws and task of drafting a model law that deals with electronic transferable records. In general terms the focus is on facilitating the creation of electronic equivalents to a paper-based transferable document or instrument. The group has followed a number of guiding principles, for example the need to be technology neutral and the key to focus on procedural uniformity as opposed to getting bogged down into differences in substantive law among countries. The working group also acknowledged the importance of including new environments such as developments E-commerce and cloud computing.

Prof. Clark, indicated he was "grateful for this opportunity to get an inside look at and make a small contribution to the extremely worthwhile and important work of UNCITRAL. It was also a great opportunity to meet and converse e-commerce experts from many other countries and to tell them about the great work being done at CUPL's College of Comparative Law".

Prof. Clark's research expertise is in the field of E-commerce and he has taught both undergraduate and post graduate courses at CUPL in this field.