The legally trained divorce mediator, ‘the officer of the court’, can use the law as a frame of reference for his conduct, but the psychologically trained divorce mediator, ‘the healer of the family’ has no such device. His primary tools are techniques to improve the communication skills of parties, their decision-making process and respecting systemic regularities, in particular where it concerns the interests of the children, i.e. visitation rights.Divorce mediators without legal training are hampered by the absence of a clear frame of reference. They are susceptible to subjective interpretations of events, counter-transference phenomena and partiality. The divorce mediator is himself his most important instrument, but also the most vulnerable.

In companies people work together intensively, especially in family run companies. In such a situation, the interests (income, capital and employment) can be enormous when parties fail to live up to each others expectations.How to deal with situations when parties are in a dead-lock and the continuity of the business is at stake? Depending on the legal form of the company and the type of conflict, there are different legal actions to settle a (legal) conflict. However, there are so many rules and different procedures for each type of legal form, that it may dazzle the reader. Moreover, these procedures may take a long time, while the parties in a family dead-lock desire an expert/arbiter/mediator proceeding expeditiously.In a sense a marriage is also a family run company. The following experiences from the area of family law are described: the processes of a divorce, the break-up announcement (the opposite of the marriage proposal), the experiment in court with the so-called regierechter in family cases, the prenuptial agreement and the plan for parenthood after a divorce. Our conclusion is that in case of a dead-lock, parties need to have a good set of rules on the settlement of disputes, to find a qualified expert/arbiter/mediator having knowledge and experience in financial/tax/pension/legal matters and familiar with dealing with emotions in a deadlock.

On Friday 23 October 2009 the seminar ‘Mediation and administration of justice’ was organised by the Belgian Federal Mediation Commission (Federale Bemiddelingscommissie), GEMME (Groupement Européens des Magistrats pour la Médiation) and Studipolis.The focus of this seminar was on the Belgian mediation act of 21 February 2005 and the European mediation directive of 21 May 2008.

The purpose of the Flemish IPOS-project is to uncover the stages which people, including children, go through following a divorce. Based on their findings the researchers will come forward with proposals to improve the quality of life during divorce i.e. through mediation. The IPOS-project started on 1 November 2007. The final report will be published in October 2011. The composition of the research team is multidisciplinary; the participating researchers are lawyers, psychologists and economists.

In Dutch case law mediation has become a common phenomenon. Therefore, recent cases focussed on fundamental aspects of mediation are discussed.

CEPINA, the Belgian Centre for Arbitration and Mediation recently published special mediation rules for the resolution of IT disputes. The most important rules are discussed. Also the background of this initiative is highlighted.

In this contribution some aspects of the pluralistic society and its impact on mediation are discussed. For that purpose, first the focus is in on what is generally understood by ‘culture’ and ‘conflict’, followed by a description of communication problems that might arise in (mediation)situations with a particular cultural dimension. Next the question is posed to what extent a mediator should be susceptible for cultural dimensions in conflicts to perform his job well. And if he is prepared to do so, what pitfalls and challenges he should be prepared for?

In the Netherlands the interest in collaborative divorce, collaborative mediation is growing. On 17 October 2008 the Vereniging Collaborative Divorce Holland (Association of Collaborative Divorce Holland) was established. One of its activities is the organization of training in collaborative divorce, mediation. The main findings of the first training program which took place on 19, 20 and 21 January 2009 are discussed in this report.

This article deals with confidentiality in mediation proceedings. Confidentiality is considered to be one of the key advantages of mediation. Usually the parties agree that they will not be compelled to produce evidence concerning the mediation, nor call the mediator as a witness in case of subsequent judicial proceedings. However, it is not sure how the court in civil judicial proceedings will handle such an agreement. The court will have to balance the interests of confidentiality and establishing the truth. In some cases it is clear that the court should not respect the confidentiality agreement, for example when there is an obligation to disclose evidence of a criminal offence. In other cases there might be proper grounds to let the confidentiality prevail, but there is no guarantee that the court will respect the confidentiality agreement. As part of the implementation of the European directive on mediation Member States are obliged to adopt provisions about admissibility of evidence in civil judicial proceedings in order to protect certain aspects of confidentiality of mediation proceedings.