Singapore Convention on enforcement of mediated settlement agreements published

Further to our earlier post, the Singapore Convention has now been published. It will be signed in Singapore on 7 August 2019 and will come into effect six months after at least three states have ratified it.

The drafters' goal is for the Singapore Convention to be for mediation what the New York Convention is for arbitration.  That the Convention is potentially significant in terms of enforcement is clear. But it is also important in terms of elevating the status of international commercial mediation and lending greater credibility to the process. Much will depend on uptake, but with the New York Convention as a blueprint, the goal is to secure numerous signatory states at the outset.

The Convention will aid enforcement of mediated settlement agreements relating to international commercial disputes, being those where:

• at least two parties to the settlement agreement operate in different contracting states; or
• the state where the substantial part of the settlement agreement is to be performed is different to where the parties to the settlement conduct business; or
• the state where the settlement agreement is most closely connected is different to where the parties to the settlement conduct business.

The Convention carves out consumer, personal, household, family, inheritance and employment disputes from its jurisdiction.

There are various procedural requirements for the underlying settlement agreement to qualify for enforcement under the Convention. There are also grounds for refusing to grant relief listed in the Convention. These include the incapacity of the parties, invalidity of the settlement agreement, serious breach of mediator standards, mediator bias and public policy.

UPDATE:  For more detail on the Convention, and commentary on some of its more interesting features, see the article by Jan O'Neill (Professional Support Lawyer, London) published on the Practical Law Dispute Resolution Blog, here.