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# What Your Sanctions Clause Forgot to Say
- URL: https://internationalarbitrationobserver.com/what-your-sanctions-clause-forgot-to-say/
- Published: 2026-09-12T17:00:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-12T17:00:30.000Z
- Author: Pierluigi Salvati
- Tags: Arbitration and Sanctions

**Your sanctions clause probably works fine — right up until someone suspends instead of terminating.** That's the quiet lesson buried in DWL v DWM (\[2026\] SGHC 179), a Singapore High Court decision that reads like a stress test for every "sanctions-resistant" contract drafted since 2022.  
  
A supplier and an energy producer, a contract in a sanctioned jurisdiction, and a bespoke clause obliging the supplier to either seek an export licence or redesign its equipment if sanctions bit. Sanctions bit. Subcontractors vanished, licences stalled, a payment got withheld "for commercial reasons." The supplier suspended the contract. A month later, the buyer terminated it — arguing the supplier's mitigation duty had **survived its own suspension**, and the supplier had breached it by standing still.  
  
The tribunal agreed. But it got there by reading two contract clauses that **neither party had ever put in front of it**. The supplier cried foul: excess of jurisdiction, denial of a fair hearing, set the award aside.  
  
The Court said no. A tribunal invited to interpret a clause "against the whole contract" is not trespassing when it does exactly that, even if the specific provisions it lands on were never cited by number. **The question isn't whether every clause was pleaded. It's whether the type of reasoning was foreseeable** once the real question was on the table. Here, it was.  
The Court did add that the tribunal might have flagged those clauses first. But **"could have been more careful" and "acted unlawfully" are different tests**, and mixing them up is how good arguments turn into losing applications.  
  
Here's the part worth stealing for our next drafting session: everyone writes a clause for what happens if performance becomes impossible. **Almost no one writes one for what happens once a party suspends rather than walks away.** That gap is exactly where this dispute was born — and exactly what the tribunal had to fill in, on the parties' behalf, without asking either of them first.  
  
**Draft for suspension. Someone will eventually decide what survives it — better that it's you.**