Hong Kong Arbitration Week: dates, organiser and what happens

The short version

• Hong Kong Arbitration Week (HKAW) is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre’s (HKIAC) flagship annual event: a week of conferences, workshops and social events held in Hong Kong in October.
• The 2026 edition ran from 19 to 23 October 2026 and was the 15th. HKIAC gives a save-the-date of 18 to 22 October 2027, which we treat as unconfirmed.
• HKIAC launched the week in 2012 and calls it the first “Arbitration Week”.
• In 2026 it welcomed over 1,200 participants from 53 jurisdictions across 45 events.
• Its flagship conference is the ADR in Asia Conference, held on 22 October 2026 at the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong.^1,2,3,4

What is Hong Kong Arbitration Week?

Hong Kong Arbitration Week (HKAW) is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre’s (HKIAC) flagship annual event: a week of conferences, workshops and social events that brings arbitration practitioners, users and others in the field to Hong Kong. A flagship event is the organiser’s headline event of the year, the one it builds the week around. The 2026 edition ran in October, and HKIAC’s save-the-date for 2027 is also in October. HKIAC describes the people it draws as leading practitioners, arbitrators, in-house counsel, academics, institutions and other members of the international dispute resolution community.^1,2,4

InvestHK, the Hong Kong government’s investment-promotion agency, says the week shows Hong Kong’s role as, in its words, a “leading arbitral seat in Asia”. A seat is the legal home of an arbitration: the place whose courts supervise it and whose law governs how it is run. This guide covers the event; arbitration weeks around the world sets it beside the other weeks on the calendar.⁴

Who runs Hong Kong Arbitration Week?

The organiser is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre (HKIAC), the arbitral institution based in Hong Kong. An institution is the body that runs cases under its own rules and puts on events like this one. HKIAC calls the week its flagship annual event and set out the 2026 figures in a post-event release on 30 October 2026, published in its news feed.^1,2,5

InvestHK publishes the official government listing for the week, with the dates, hours and languages, and points readers to HKIAC’s own programme. This guide covers the event; for the law of the Hong Kong seat, the Arbitration Ordinance (Cap 609), the HKIAC 2024 Rules, fees and enforcement, see arbitration in Hong Kong. What institutions and courts say about AI in arbitration is in our guide to AI in arbitration.⁴

When is Hong Kong Arbitration Week?

HKAW 2026 ran from 19 to 23 October 2026 in Hong Kong, its 15th edition. InvestHK lists daily hours of 9:00am to 9:00pm Hong Kong time, in English and Putonghua.^1,4

HKIAC gives a save-the-date of 18 to 22 October 2027 and says it looks forward to welcoming the arbitration community back to Hong Kong. As of 10 November 2026 this is a save-the-date, not a confirmed, programmed edition, so treat the 2027 dates as provisional.²

You can register and see the current programme on HKIAC’s own event site; that is where to go for both. The InvestHK listing carries the same dates with a visit-website link and an add-to-calendar option, and is a useful cross-check on the official schedule.^2,4

What is the ADR in Asia Conference?

The ADR in Asia Conference is the week’s flagship conference. ADR stands for alternative dispute resolution: arbitration, mediation and the other routes to resolving disputes outside the courts. In 2026 the conference ran on Thursday 22 October 2026, from 8:30am to 4:30pm, in the Grand Ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, under the theme “Arbitration: Recalibrating for the Future”. HKIAC says the programme examined the quality of arbitral decision-making, how to handle improper conduct by a party, the readiness of lawyers for an AI future, the international character of arbitration, and how far arbitration can recalibrate for the years ahead.^1,3

HKIAC reports the conference itself drew 350 participants and 28 speakers from 15 jurisdictions. Those are the conference’s own numbers, smaller than the week-wide totals, and we keep them separate from the figures for the week as a whole.¹

So HKAW is the week, and the ADR in Asia Conference is the flagship conference within it. The Four Seasons figure is the conference venue only; HKIAC names no single venue for the week as a whole, which runs across the city.^3,4

How big is Hong Kong Arbitration Week?

In 2026 the week welcomed over 1,200 participants from 53 jurisdictions across 45 events, on HKIAC’s own post-event figures. These are the headline numbers to use for the week. HKIAC says those participants came to debate the main questions facing arbitration and to build professional relationships across jurisdictions and regions.¹

The HKAW event site gives the week-wide counts a little differently, reporting 1,200+ registrations, 53 jurisdictions, 210+ speakers and 40+ affiliated events. The 210+ speaker count is for the whole week; the 28 speakers above belong to the ADR in Asia Conference alone. We keep the week-wide figures and the single-conference figures apart, because the two are easy to confuse.²

For how the field is using AI across these events, see AI in arbitration and the wider picture in AI in dispute resolution. The nearest comparators on the calendar are Singapore Convention Week and, in November, Dubai Arbitration Week.

What happens during Hong Kong Arbitration Week?

The week is built around the ADR in Asia Conference, with a programme of affiliated events, receptions and social events around it. Many of the affiliated events are run by firms and institutions rather than by HKIAC, which is why the week fills Hong Kong for five days. In 2026 HKIAC counted 40+ affiliated events, and opened the week with a welcome reception that gathered over 480 guests.^1,2

The week’s programme ran to themes including green arbitration, women in arbitration, AI and digital evidence, expedited procedures, investment protection, cybersecurity and cross-border enforcement. HKIAC says the affiliated events also covered developments in arbitration markets across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Russia and Central Asia. A session on cross-border arbitration with Mainland China drew over 140 attendees, and a women in arbitration event at HKIAC on 23 October 2026 drew 110.^1,2

Social events included the Hong Kong Arbitration Charity Ball, which welcomed over 600 guests, and a pub quiz. We name only HKIAC and generic session themes here, not sponsors or the hosts of affiliated events. We do not build a day-by-day table, because only the ADR in Asia Conference carries an official date; a fuller calendar would have to invent dates.^1,2

When did Hong Kong Arbitration Week start?

HKIAC launched the week in 2012 and describes it as the first “Arbitration Week”. It counts 2026 as the 15th edition, consistent with a 2012 start counted inclusively. Over those 15 editions, HKIAC says it has kept the same aim: a programme that tracks the main questions in dispute resolution and draws arbitration practitioners from around the world to Hong Kong.¹

Beyond “launched in 2012” and “the first ‘Arbitration Week’”, HKIAC’s current pages carry little detail of that first edition, so we do not state a 2012 attendance or event count.¹

The format, a city-wide week built around one institution’s flagship conference, has since been taken up by other seats. We hand that comparison to arbitration weeks around the world.

What do these weeks tell us about where arbitration is heading?

In our view, the arbitration weeks are where the field argues in public about its own future, and Hong Kong Arbitration Week is a clear case. The themes that keep returning run through its 2026 programme: the cost and speed of cases, access for users from more places, the competition between seats, and now the use of AI. The flagship conference was themed “Arbitration: Recalibrating for the Future”, with sessions on the quality of arbitral decision-making and the readiness of lawyers for an AI future; across the wider week the programme ran to green arbitration and women in arbitration. The scale says something too: over 1,200 people from 53 jurisdictions, run by one institution, grown from a 2012 launch to a 15th edition. Read across the circuit, the picture is consistent. It is a field working to carry a heavier caseload and keep a cleaner record of it, across more borders than before. That is our reading of the published programme, not a forecast. The AI thread we follow in AI in arbitration; the full circuit is in arbitration weeks around the world.^1,2,3