The UIHJ, represented by its 1st Vice-President, Mathieu Chardon, participated in the 6th meeting of the working group on mediation of the CEPEJ (CEPEJ-GT-MED) on 17 and 18 October 2019 in Strasbourg, France
The CEPEJ-GT-MED was represented by six experts from Czech Republic (Anna Marova), Lithuania (Rimantas Simaitis, president), Portugal (Maria Da Coneiçao Oliveira), Romania (Violeta Belegante), Slovenia (Nina Betteto), and Switzerland (Jean Mirimanoff), with the help of scientific experts and assisted by the CEPEJ secretariat. The UIHJ participates in the work of the group as an observer member.
Under its current mandate, the CEPEJ-GT-MED is entrusted to facilitate the implementation of the Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers to Member States concerning mediation and, in particular:
a. assess the impact in the States of the existing CEPEJ Guidelines and update these Guidelines, where appropriate; To this end, the working group has carried out an impact assessment which allows it to have an overview of the use made of the various Council of Europe tools within Member States and to draw up recommendations for mediation actors and public authorities in order to promote the development of mediation in Europe.
b. draft, if appropriate, further tools aimed to ensure an effective implementation of existing recommendations and guidelines; To this end, the working group is developing a “toolkit” to support the main mediation actors and States with concrete and varied tools on, for example, training and qualification in mediation, access to mediation, awareness-raising of the judiciary, users of justice and the general public, etc. It should be noted that some of these tools are developed jointly with organizations representing the relevant legal professions.
c. contribute, where appropriate, to the implementation of the relevant co-operation programmes. (Source: CEPEJ)
In this context, the meeting addressed the many items on the agenda. Among these points, training programs for judges, lawyers, enforcement officers and notaries were discussed. In this respect, the CEPEJ proposed to the UIHJ to form a group of experts to work on the development of a document concerning the training of judicial officers on mediation, starting with their mediation awareness-raising mecanisms, which was accepted by the representative of the UIHJ.
