Singapore Convention on Mediation and Recognition and Enforcement of Settlement Agreement

Abstract

On December 18, 2018, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the ‘United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (known as the ‘Singapore Convention on Mediation’)’ proposed by the UNCITRAL. This Convention is akin to the New York Convention and focuses on ensuring the recognition and enforcement of mediated international settlement agreements. We signed this Convention on August 7, 2019, and shall establish a domestic legal basis for the implementation of the Convention to fulfill the obligations of the Party to the Convention. Especially, the Convention is based on the principles of direct enforcement that needs a domestic regulation to provide certainty in granting relief by domestic courts. The most important domestic legal basis is to legislate a Mediation Act that regulates key features of the mediation proceedings. The Act should, above all things, explicitly regulate the concept of mediation, the qualification and training of mediator, the confidentiality of procedure, the interruption of extinctive prescription and the effect of settlement agreement. With regard to granting and seeking relief of a settlement agreement prescribed in Article 3 of the Convention, the principle of automatic recognition shall apply, and for a speedy and efficient proceeding, a court decision on recognition and enforcement shall be made in the form of an order, not a judgment. In order to ensure that enforcement actually carried out as much as possible, especially the possibility of reformulation of a mediated settlement agreement by the competent court in the execution procedure should be recognized without modifying essential substance of the settlement agreement. Regarding the grounds for refusing to grant relief, the incapability of settlement by mediation, contrary to the Convention, can not be a refusal ground. In principle, a mediability, namely the ability of the subject matter of the dispute to be mediated, can be broadly accepted, unless there is a special regulated case that must be settled by court trial. A successful domestic implementation of the Convention by preparing a good legal environment will enable us to play a leading role in the international mediation.