Officials are stressing the importance of mediation in the justice system as a five-day Mediation Training Workshop got underway in Dominica at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus, on Elmshall Road.
Over 23 persons, including legal practitioners and business persons will be better trained in meditation techniques in order to be able to become experts in the field of court-connected mediation.
“The Court-connected Mediation Program of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court forms a very vital part of the court’s decision making mechanism and it is important in the functioning of the judicial system,” Chairperson of the Local Mediation Committee Her Ladyship, Justice Birnie Stephenson, said while addressing the opening ceremony on Monday.
According to Justice Stephenson, mediation is very important not only to the court system but also in the workplace and in the home.
She stated that participants can utilize the skills acquired at the workshop to mediate between their children or themselves and love ones.
Stephenson encouraged mediators to speak in an orderly manner and put their all into their task.
“Regardless to how impossible it appears at the beginning of mediation,” Justice Stephenson stated. “The most difficult of persons, the most difficult of cases, I am of the view can be settled if the mediator handles it correctly.”
She indicated that all mediations can be successful, “but you the mediators have to put some of your all into it.”
Meantime Regional Mediation Coordinator, Francis Compton, said, “We are not training persons here to be good mediators; we are training persons here to be mediators.”
According to him, every mediator should strive to be a good one.
“We are not training persons here to be engineers or architects, or lawyers,” he stressed. “We are training those lawyers, those architects, those engineers to be mediators.”
He stated that after participants are trained as a mediator it is expected that, they will spend a lot of time in, “self- education” and preparing themselves to become “good mediators”, in order to mediate any type of case.
The workshop is organized by UWI in conjunction with the Judicial Education Institute and the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.
Lets hope there is a component on speeding up these Mediations otherwise its a waste. Just ask the port workers.
Where were the police?they need that training more than anybody else,because they allow the fact that they have the power of the law on their side,and they belong to the police”force” that the only thing they can resort to use in any situation is force,except when it comes to one of their colleagues.
I hope that in the future a training session will be held exclusively for the police,and that should be an annual training for them