Greetings from Prague - World Forum of Mediation Centres

UIA World Forum of Mediation Centres took part in Prague from Friday June 7 to Saturday June 8 20013. What are the newest developments mentioned during the symposium?
The beginning of the June 2013 was affected by heavily floods that stroke in all the Czech Republic and that threatened the Czech capital Prague. By coincidence, one of the largest meetings of mediators from all the parts of world organized by the Union Internationale des Avocats took part in Prague, so the coming participants were able to observe the rising water level of Prague’s river Vltava, as well as the beautiful city islands disappearing under water.
Fortunately, the venue of Forum – the Czech Bar Association headquarters remained in the dry, so the participants were able to witness an excellent event including interesting speeches and fruitful discussions.
The World Forum of Mediation Centres was created back in 2001 by the Union Internationale des Avocats and its Mediation and Conflict Prevention Commission. It associates the most important Mediation and ADR Centres coming from all around the globe. The Forum is regarded as a platform for exchanging of views and opinions concerning the recent developments in the field of ADR.
The Prague meeting was the 18th since the creation of the Forum.
During its rich program, the participants addressed the issue of translation ant the role of interpreters in mediation (Xiaohui Yuan) or the news concerning mediation of the sport disputes (Ozlem Susler, Frank Fowlie, Luigi Fumagalli). An excited discussion was launched by the topic of success fees (Patrick van Leynseele, F. Peter Phillips, Robert Cholensky and Roberta Regazzoni) that divided the audience in two opposite groups having different opinion on the issue.
Thanks to the modern techniques, the Forum approached the issue of Online Dispute Resolution (Catherine Cotsaki). Colin Rule informed the participants about latest developments in that field. He joined the audience via Skype form his house in California, which highlighted the importance and the possibilities of new technologies in ADR of 21st century. Still the majority of the participants remained bit sceptical, especially regarding the use of software utilities in classic mediation.
The other day, the speakers addressed the issue of mediation of consumer disputes in three European countries – in France, in the Czech Republic and in Slovenia, (Katarina Kresal, Jocelyne Canetti, Martin Svatos and Aleš Zalar). An interesting contribution concerned the issue of dispute prevention that enables to compare the costs of dispute resolution and the prevention in the form of Dispute Boards was proposed by Michel Nardin, Christopher Miers, and Colin J.Wall.
The program continued by the interactive discussion on the recent developments in the field of mediation and by the news of mediation centres.
As far as the floods are concerned, fortunately, the only one that approached the participants was a flood of new and interesting ideas and news on mediation. Next session of World Forum of Mediation Centres will be held in Houston, Texas USA in March 2014.