THE "BURSA" "BENEFITS OF MEDIATION IN DEALING WITH CONFLICTS" CONFERENCE Gheţea: "The financial crisis has made the use of mediation increasingly necessary"

About 150 mediators, businesspeople, bankers and lawyers yesterday discussed the benefits and the challenges of the mediation process, bringing into discussion the opportunity of the new provisions of the Civil Procedure Code concerning this segment and showing an increased interest in the subject.

The Conference "The benefits of Mediation in dealing with conflicts" organized by the BURSA newspaper together with the Mediation Council and the International Mediation Council, has emphasized the differences between dealing with conflicts using mediation and solving them through legal lawsuits.

The new Civil Procedure Code, which came into effect on February 15th, 2013, requires the parties involved in a litigation to prove before filing a lawsuit, that they have participated in a session of information about mediation.

Therefore, mediation is used as an alternative means of solving lawsuits, in order to relieve the workload of the courts.

The sanction which stipulated that the lawsuit would be inadmissible in court if the parties did not attend the session of information about mediation first, was postponed until August 1st, 2013.

In the opinion of Dorin Valeriu Bădulescu, the president of the Mediation Council, the procedure of mediation is far cheaper and more advantageous than the standard judgment. Other benefits it has include celerity, flexibility and the direct involvement of the parties.

The mediation activity contributes to the creation of long-term relations between the parties participating in the procedure, due to its non-aggressive nature, considers Nicoleta Munteanu, the president of the International Mediation Center.

Cosmin Vasile, a partner at law firm Zamfirescu Racoţi Predoiu, considers that making it mandatory to inform about the benefits of mediation represents the best solution for promoting this procedure, as even in countries which have a tradition of decades in using alternative conflict solving methods, the main impediment for mediation is the reluctance of the business sector, which is not familiar enough with this procedure.

The financial crisis has made the use of mediation increasingly necessary, which led, in 2010, to the apparition of the first specialized mediators in the banking sector, the president of the Romanian Banking Association said, who also expressed his discontent over the fact that the Association of Mediators in the Financial and Banking Sector (FINBAN) is not known well enough among the members of the public.

Cristian Pârvan, the secretary general of the Association of Romanian Businesspeople (AOAR), considers that the people involved in a mediation process need to be very careful about the contents of the contracts and he emphasized that legislation is very important in the mediation processes.