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The OHADAC project

Presentation of the project

Inspired by the uncontested success of the OHADA unification process in Sub-Saharan Africa (www.ohada.com) started in the early 1990s, OHADAC is an unprecedent project of cooperation and legal integration at the regional level.

This project has been implemented since 2007 by the ACP Legal association, presided by Judge Catherine Sargenti.

This project embraces all Caribbean States from Cuba to Surinam and Guyana, including Venezuela, irrespective of whether they belong to CARICOM/CARIFORUM or other regional organizations. Partner States from a Common law tradition – in the great majority of English speaking territories, as well as the civil law tradition – mostly in the French, Dutch and Spanish speaking part of the Caribbean, will coexist in this new dispensation.

The objective of the OHADAC project is to harmonize company law, arbitration law, accounting, enforcement procedures, debt recovery, general commercial law, labour law, and transport, etc.

By bringing together States and people, the OHADAC project works towards the economic development of the region and contributes to the development of trade at the regional level.

In this context, the creation of the CARO Centre offers the key players of the region an institution able to assure them of the legal security they need to expand their activities, through the use of reliable and efficient methods of dispute resolution and prevention.

OHADAC texts

The OHADAC project has already benefited from financial support from the European Union's Interreg IV program. Thanks to this support, model-legislation in the field of business law was drafted and proposed for adoption by Caribbean States.

During this first phase, model-laws were drafted by experts in the following key areas: principles of international commercial contracts; private international law; commercial companies; OHADAC draft rules of arbitration and conciliation.

These texts are available below:

The elaboration of model laws continues during the phase of implementation of the OHADAC Regional Arbitration Centre, in order to further develop and reinforce the corpus of harmonized legal texts proposed to Caribbean States for adoption.

OHADAC texts have been subject to many commentaries from the doctrine, which is compiled at the following address: http://www.ohadac.com/bibliographie.html.

The OHADAC project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the auspices of the INTERREG CARAÏBES programme
Interreg Caraïbe
Union Européenne
OHADAC
CCI des iles de Guadeloupe
ACP Legal