It was Thursday, February 24th, 2022. From the morning, I had been mediating a dispute between a grandfather and two of his granddaughters. Then, during the break, I switched on my phone and read the news. Very shocking news. As a person that has spent all his professional life bringing peace and understanding to the…

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard (PON) sends to subscribers a daily blogpost of interesting negotiation thoughts and analyses. It regularly visits the negotiation styles of world leaders with the idea that ‘by studying the negotiation styles of famous leaders, we can identify what to emulate and what to abandon’. Unsurprisingly it has shone a…

Corona is managed under different circumstances around the world. These depend on resources and infrastructure, and also on political interpretations of the science and of the effects of spreading infection in society. There are also cultural factors that play a role here – concerning the political culture of a country and also the values that…

On 29 January 2021, the European Union and Canada adopted four decisions providing for specific rules regarding the Investment Court System (“ICS”) agreed in the 2016 EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (“CETA”). One of them includes the Rules for Mediation. See: general facts about CETA. The CETA was signed on 30 October 2016, and…

In a few weeks’ time I will come to the end of a two-year mediation engagement in South Eastern Europe. The conflict in question relates to environmental pollution. The issues are complex and heavily contested, and there are many stakeholders – government, city authorities, environmental groups, investors and business, to name a few. It has…

Anna Howard’s first book, ‘EU Cross-Border Commercial Mediation: Listening to Disputants – Changing the Frame; Framing the Changes’ (published by Kluwer), is an important contribution to the literature about the practice and promotion of mediation. It deserves a wide readership among academics and practitioners alike and I hope that potential readers will not be deflected…

“I think the EU will need to move significantly on both those key points because they’re points of principle.” (Dominic Raab, UK Foreign Secretary, speaking on the BBC this morning) The Brexit negotiation, despite its dizzying stakes, has triggered a fair amount of wry humour. I’ve poked gentle fun at the protagonists myself: Brexit Irritators:…

For this blogpost I interviewed Lin Adrian, associate professor of mediation and director of the master’s in Mediation and Conflict Resolution at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Together with the master’s in Mediation and Conflict Management at the Viadrina European University in Frankfurt / Oder Germany, Lin conducted an empirical study on the effects of mediation…

Are agreements to mediate enforceable? The short (and incomplete) answer is: yes, they may be provided they are drafted appropriately. In this post we review a recent English judgment which sets outs guidelines for the enforceability of agreements to mediate under English law. In August 2019, the Technology and Construction Court of the Queen’s Bench…

Early in the morning, I got a call from a lawyer representing one of the parties in cross border mediation. “Would you consider changing the venue for our meeting?”, he asked. Usually not a surprising demand. This time an expected one. We were about to meet in Milan, Italy which at the time being had…