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In an article in the International Review of Law, Haya Amer Khalaf and Mahmoud Dodeen examine whether hardship falls within Article 79 of the 1980 Vienna Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), which governs the concept of “impediment”. Because the Convention contains no specific provision on hardship, scholarship and comparative case law diverge.
The authors trace the divergence to interpretive approaches that read the impediment through the domestic concepts of force majeure and hardship. They argue that the impediment has an autonomous legal character and must be understood within the Convention itself to secure uniform interpretation, and they assess the CISG Advisory Council’s view that hardship is included in the concept of impediment.
Whether hardship falls within the concept of impediment in Article 79 CISG
By arguing that the impediment in Article 79 CISG must be read independently of domestic force-majeure concepts, it brings Arabic-language scholarship into the hardship debate.
International Review of Law · 2026
DOI 10.29117/irl.2026.0381