Meet Maria Chiara Malaguti, the new Presindent of the Uncitral MSMEs Working Group

The UNCITRAL Commission aims to harmonise domestic legislation and create a legal environment enabling trade

Mrs Maria Chiara Malaguti is the new President of the UNCITRAL working group on Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). Italian lawyer, Professor of International Law and consultant for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we talked to Mrs. Malaguti to better understand what UNICITRAL (United Nation Commission on International Trade Law) does and how useful it work can be for Italian small and medium enterprises.

As Mr Malaguti explained, “UNCITRAL adopts a range of legal instruments to harmonise domestic legislation and create a legal environment enabling trade”. The Treaty on International Sales of Goods is one of them, but UNCITRAL issues instruments on many other topics, such as arbitration, insolvency, secured transactions, e-commerce.

UNCITRAL commitment to modernize and harmonize rules on international business is extremely useful for Italy. Mr. Malaguti clarified that “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has established a national coordination group involving all administrations and the market to both prepare Italian positions in the UNCITRAL works and promote the adoption of its instruments”. In addition, the Italian lawyer stressed that “now that Italy is focusing so much on modernization and internationalization of companies, as for the Destinazione Italia project and the Diplomazia della Crescita, UNCITRAL works” has become even more precious.

Mrs Malaguti has been a member of this Commission for a long time. Today, her new role as President of the MSMEs working group means more work, as well as a lot of satisfaction. “For Italy I think it will be a very good chance to confirm its commitment to the rule of law in international law, in particular in development. This working group focuses on an enabling legal environment for micro, small and medium enterprises and I hope we will be able to show the importance of those realities for our economies and the need to reinforce their involvement in trade”.

In particular, Mrs Malaguti explained that UNCITRAL does not help multinationals, only. On the contrary, the Italian lawyer emphasized how happy she is in realizing that the Commission recently decided to focus on “micro, small and medium enterprises”. Indeed, “it is time to realize we need to enlarge the basis forinternational cooperation. These realities partially require different patterns of modernization and harmonisation and this working group should exactly reflect this”.