Costa Rica has a new Arbitration Law, which is based on the 2006 version of the UNCITRAL Model Law. The relative speed with which the new Arbitration Law was adopted came as a surprise to many. Only a few months ago, at the Second International Arbitration Congress organized by the ICC Costa Rica in San José on 23 February, several colleagues from Costa Rica had predicted that adoption of the Law would probably take many more months or even years. Instead, Congress passed the Law only a month later and it entered into force on 25 May 2011, the date of its official publication.