The 11th BRICS+ Legal Forum convenes at a defining moment for international legal and institutional order. Amid tectonic shifts in global trade patterns, the fragmentation of multilateral governance, the rapid emergence of technology-driven regulatory challenges, and challenges to the very notion of state sovereignty itself, legal systems in BRICS+ economies face a common imperative: to evolve from frameworks designed for a different era into architectures capable of supporting a multipolar, innovation-led, and sustainable global economy.

The Forum's theme - Rule of Law Frameworks and Institutional Capacity Building for Economic Resilience, Innovation and Sustainability - reflects a deliberate shift from declaratory engagement to structural problem-solving. The sessions are designed to move from diagnosis to institutional design: identifying the friction points, regulatory gaps, and governance deficits that currently constrain economic integration and cross-border trust, and proposing concrete frameworks and mechanisms to address them.

Five substantive domains anchor the programme: (i) the architecture of legal systems as shock-absorbers in conditions of economic volatility; (ii) institutional capacity building for innovation-driven economies; (iii) BRICS-centric dispute resolution, with particular attention to SME-sensitive and multi-jurisdictional arbitration frameworks; (iv) climate finance, developmental justice, and the legal infrastructure supporting sustainable growth; and (v) AI governance, digital trust, and the emerging regulatory compact for the data economy. Cutting across these domains is a unifying inquiry: what institutional design choices best enable BRICS+ legal systems to build mutual trust, reduce transactional friction, and support the co-creation of economic value at scale?

The 11th BRICS+ Legal Forum meets against the backdrop of an evolving and coherent body of Heads of State commitments that together define the legal community's working mandate. The Johannesburg II Declaration (August 2023), which brought the BRICS+ formation into being, called for reform of the global financial architecture, opposition to trade-restrictive measures inconsistent with WTO rules, and the advancement of local currency payment systems as instruments of the economic sovereignty of developing states. The Kazan Declaration (October 2024), the first summit-level expression of the expanded BRICS+ membership, reaffirmed the commitment to restoring a fully-functioning two-tier WTO dispute settlement mechanism, condemned unilateral coercive measures as incompatible with the UN Charter and destructive of sustainable development, and endorsed a Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence - placing the legal architecture of the data economy squarely on the BRICS+ institutional agenda. The BRICS+ Foreign Ministers' Outcome Document (New Delhi, May 2026) and the 11th NDB Annual Meeting (Moscow, May 2026) have, weeks before this Forum convenes, consolidated that agenda further: reaffirming the NDB's member-led, demand-driven model as a rule-of-law proposition grounded in the sovereign equality of member states and the development priorities of borrowing economies; calling for expeditious finalisation of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism; and committing to implementation of the AI governance framework following India's AI Impact Summit of February 2026. Across this arc - from Johannesburg to Kazan to New Delhi - a consistent legal logic is discernible: that the rules governing trade, finance, technology, and security must be reformed to reflect the realities of a multipolar world, and that this reform requires legal architecture, not merely political will. The 11th BRICS+ Legal Forum will strive to give that architecture concrete institutional form - translating successive summit commitments into treaty frameworks, regulatory designs, and institutional mechanisms capable of enduring beyond the political moment that produced them.

The Forum brings together senior members of the judiciary, ministers and senior officials, regulators, multilateral development finance institutions, leading arbitration institutions, practitioners, technologists, and academic scholars from across BRICS+ jurisdictions and partner countries. Consistent with the BAI's institutional mandate, the programme privileges structured dialogue over presentation - each session is anchored by a framing note, informed by practitioner experience, and oriented toward actionable conclusions.