Centre can help small Pacific states, says Judge

A JUDGE says the training of mediations conducted by the alternate dispute resolution centre in the country should assist smaller jurisdictions in the Pacific.
Deputy Chief Justice Ambeng Kandakasi was giving an overview of the challenges faced in mediation in PNG and the Pacific during the international mediation and arbitrary conference.
He said that although mediation training had not reached the entire country, it should assist other smaller countries in Pacific.
“We have 133 mediators already. Some are professionally accredited and a few fully accredited. We are hoping to get all fully accredited by the end of this year as feedbacks are very good,” Justice Kandakasi said.
He said a survey showed that almost 98 per cent of those trained had been giving feedbacks to the system.
“We give feedback evaluation forms at the end of each mediation. Then the statistics are fed into our computer systems which has now produced these interesting set of surveys.”
Justice Kandakas said an interesting point was that lawyers and judges thought they were smart by getting to the key issues quickly, but they hardly got around the background which was the cause of the conflict.”