Hong Kong has recently passed a piece of legislation with the good intention of protecting children from serious abuse and protecting the specified professionals for making the mandatory reports. Mandatory Reporting of Child Abuse Ordinance (Cap. 650) (“the Ordinance”) was gazetted on 19 July 2024 and it is understood that the legislation will come into…
Mediation has been universally praised as an effective tool in resolving family disputes and lowering the social and economic costs of separation and divorce. This is why many jurisdictions in the recent past have adopted various measures to encourage parties to a family breakdown to try mediation, including through mandating them into the procedure. A…
Secondary school students also have an important role to play in upholding the rule of law. The idea of organising a mediation essay competition for secondary school students was mooted in 2019. Despite the covid pandemic, the Mediation Essay Competition 2020 was successfully organised by the Department of Justice, the Education Bureau, Rotary International…
Dear Young Mediation Enthusiast, Thank you for writing to me again. Time really flies as my last letter to you was written ten months ago on 2 December 2021. It is most encouraging to hear that you have been doing mediation cases of different nature and you find the work as a family mediator most…
“The world is made, not found.” (W Barnet Pearce) I had been a mediator for about 10 years before I heard parties’ initial words described as their “opening statement.” This may surprise some readers, though probably not if they began, like me, in family mediation, nor community or workplace. Other descriptions are available, as our…
Mr. Jawad has been a mediator since 2007 and a passionate promoter of mediation in India from its earliest days. Jawad works as a mediator and trainer with the Mediation and Conciliation Project Committee of the Supreme Court of India and is a global faculty with ADR ODR International UK. He is a SIMI accredited…
A quarter century ago, Professor Leonard Riskin published an article describing a grid of mediator orientiations including a facilitative-evaluative dimension. Despite critiques of this framework, including by Riskin himself, many mediators, trainers, and teachers still use these concepts as mediation models, expressing strong feelings that one model is good and the other is bad. These…
(This post is being republished because of technical problems when it was first published). Thanks to Martin Svatos, for pointing out in his recent blog a number of cases where mediators or would-be mediators feature in popular films. That set me thinking … A few years ago, I offered a workshop on mediation based on…
“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (2011: 390) This blog arises from my recent reading of Dr Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End (2014). This might…
James Bond enters a casino where a beautiful girl is sitting at the bar. He approaches her, buys her a drink and makes his obligatory introduction: “Bond, James Bond…” After brief chatting, she asks him about his profession. Then, the usually reckless hero comes up with a cover story: “I am a mediator… Traveling to…
