Chicken and egg - which came first!?
Recap
Only arbitrators elected through a smart contract by the community have any mandate to operate.
Like EOS mainnet, ECAF was started by interim bootstrapping. Which is to say, it cannot rely on the chain to elect its arbitrators because it was there before the chain, so the chain could start up with the BPs fully protected by dispute resolution.
Now as we move forward, nobody's comfortable ... but the reality is that we have no referenda contract so we're a bit stuck.
RE: Tokenika's take on sustainable EOS arbitration