THE SINGAPORE CONVENTION ON MEDIATED SETTLEMENT AGREEMENTS: A NEW STRING TO THE BOW OF INTERNATIONAL MEDIATION?

On 7 August 2019 the Singapore Convention on recognition and enforcement of international mediated settlement agreements (hereinafter, the Singapore Convention)(1 )became open for signature. This multilateral treaty was drafted by UNCITRAL after a labourious discussion that spanned several years and was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 December 2018. In order to mirror the provisions of the Singapore Convention, the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Conciliation of 2002 was amended and renamed as UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Mediation and International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation.(2) The purpose of this essay is to present an overview of the major contents of the Singapore Convention, a treaty aimed at providing uniform enforcement mechanisms for the mediated settlement agreements by which international commercial disputes are resolved. The hope is that the Convention will promote a wider use of cross-border mediation. Just as the New York Convention of 1958(3) has been a successful instrument of international arbitration, the Singapore Convention is expected to make mediation more appealing thanks to specific and harmonized rules that are intended to make enforcement of settlement agreements easier and quicker to obtain.