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Page Number: 13.0

10 

GE ENERGY POWER CONVERSION FRANCE SAS 
v. OUTOKUMPU STAINLESS USA, LLC 
Opinion of the Court 

and (2).  Report of the United Nations Commission on In-
ternational Trade Law on the Work of Its Thirty-Ninth Ses-
sion, Recommendation Regarding the Interpretation of Ar-
ticle II, Paragraph 2, and Article VII, Paragraph 1, of the 
Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign
Arbitral Awards ¶¶1, 2, U. N. Doc. A/61/17, annex II (July 
7, 2006) (UN recommendation).

These sources, while generally pointing in one direction,
are not without their faults.  The court decisions, domestic 
legislation, and UN recommendation relied on by the par-
ties occurred decades after the finalization of the New York 
Convention’s  text  in  1958.    This  diminishes  the  value  of 
these  sources  as  evidence  of  the  original  shared  under-
standing of the treaty’s meaning.  Moreover, unlike the ac-
tions and decisions of signatory nations, we have not previ-
ously  relied  on  UN  recommendations  to  discern  the
meaning of treaties.  See also Yang v. Majestic Blue Fisher-
ies, LLC, 876 F. 3d 996, 1000–1001 (CA9 2017) (declining to
give weight to the 2006 UN recommendation).  But to the 
extent this evidence is given any weight, it confirms our in-
terpretation of the Convention’s text.  

3 
Finally,  the  parties  dispute  whether  the  Executive’s  in-
terpretation of the New York Convention should affect our 
analysis.  The United States claims that we should apply a 
“ ‘canon of deference’ ” and give “ ‘ “great weight” ’ ” to an in-
terpretation set forth by the Executive in an amicus brief 
submitted  to  the  D. C.  Circuit  in  2014.    Brief  for  United 
States as Amicus Curiae 30 (quoting Abbott v. Abbott, 560 
U. S. 1, 15 (2010)); see also Brief for United States as Ami-
cus  Curiae  in  No.  13–7004  (CADC),  pp. 7,  9.    GE  Energy 
echoes this request.  Outokumpu, on the other hand, argues 
that  the  Executive’s  noncontemporaneous  interpretation 
sheds no light on the meaning of the treaty, asserting that
the Executive expressed the “opposite . . . view at the time