“The highest percentage of mediations completed last year conerned banking services, leasing and insurance; 103 to be exact”, Assistant Justice Minister Jelena Deretić stated at today’s opening of the Mediation in Finance Services Cases conference. She said that a total of 14 mediators had confirmed involvement in those cases and that the statistics suggesting that one sixth of all mediations in 2017 concerned those fields were not surprising. “One ought to bear in mind the fact that these cases are ideal for mediation because they concerned various areas of (comparative) law“, Deretić stated, adding that those numbers were still incomparable to the number of civil disputes between banks and insurance companies. She explained that having reviewed mediators’ annual reports for 2017, the Ministry had recorded 619 concluded agreements on mediation as dispute resolution, which although being three times more than the year before represented a very low number of mediations compared to that of civil court proceedings. “One of the Government’s main strategic goals is to unburden the courts, to accelerate proceedings and to inform the citizens about the different dispute resolution options, their advantages and disadvantages. One way of achieving this goal is precisely to promote the use of alternative means of dispute resolution”, Deretić commented.
The National Bank of Serbia Vice-Governor Željko Jović said that most of last year’s cases (92) had in fact been resolved through the Bank’s mediation owing to the its important competences or, simply, its authority. “We recognised the significance of mediation and the various benefits any one of us could have from having disputes resolved through mediation and, consequently, avoiding unnecessary litigation“, Jović highlighted.
Emminent mediators from the U.S.A. Daniel Weinstein and Bruce Edwards also spoke at the conference, otherwise organised by the Ministry of Justice and the National Bank of Serbia as part of their joint initiative to promotion mediation in Serbia.