Faced with the chronic overload of the judiciary and the maturation of arbitration law, companies operating in Tunisia must arbitrate, in both senses of the word, between two radically different procedural logics.
The choice of the mode of resolution of commercial disputes, often relegated to a standard clause in contracts, nevertheless directly conditions the duration, cost, and actual outcome of a dispute.
A justice committed to tackling delays
Commercial litigation brought before Tunisian ordinary courts continues to suffer from an overload documented by practitioners and acknowledged by the Ministry of Justice itself.
Before the Court of First Instance, a claim for payment or for contractual performance typically passes through three phases: filing and service of the petition, the examination of the case and the judgment on the merits, and then the execution of the decision, each exposed to adjournments and to service deadlines that mechanically lengthen the procedure.
For quantified contractual claims, checks, bills of exchange or promissory notes, Article 59 of the Code of Civil and Commercial Procedures opens an accelerated path, the order to pay, a non-contentious procedure that allows obtaining an enforceable title without a hearing when the debtor has a known domicile in Tunisia. This device remains however limited to certain claims and does not cover neither complex contractual disputes nor disagreements among partners or shareholders.
Aware of this reality, the authorities have since 2025 embarked on a digital transformation presented as structuring. More than 25,000 trials were held remotely in the year 2025 alone, and the development plan 2026-2030 sets as a priority the rationalization of judicial time, the alleviation of the burden on the courts and the revision of civil and commercial procedures, with the announced creation of a corps of judgment writers tasked with supporting the magistrates.
These initiatives, as real as they are, will bear fruit only gradually. The company facing today a commercial dispute must cope with the current delays, not with those promised for the period ahead.
Arbitration, a mature legal framework
