Researcher Ibrahim Khalid Yahya, commercial law student at Faculty of Graduate Studies at Arab American University, defended his thesis titled “The Role of Hard-Ship Theory in Contract Balancing in International Trade”.

“The international commercial contract surrounding circumstances affect parties’ obligations. One of them may become burdened with difficulties that would not have been taken into account at the contraction time, if such circumstances hadn’t occurred. And if the national contract was subject to such conditions its financial and economic viability and impact on countries’ economies makes these changing circumstances impact bigger and requires different solutition”.

He added, “Therefore, the parties knew the renegotiation condition starting with their contracts. Then settled in the principles of UNIDROIT under an integrated theory known as the Hard-Ship”. Noting, this theory provided for a renegotiation between the parties once the contract conditions and its data constitutes to exhaust one party to seek, by negotiation, to remove hardship by rebalancing the contract and place the parties equally without insuring the failure but to bridge the contract and take injured debtor into account for changing circumstances to protect it from collapsing. Which is not desired by the international commercial contract parties with significant costs and effects.

By the end, the committee of Thesis Supervisor and head of the committee Dr. Yousef Shindi, Arab American University Internal examiner Dr. Mahmoud Salameh and External examiner from An-Najah University Dr. Ghassan Khalid, decided to give the student Ibrahim Yahya Master degree.