V.O. Abolonin,

Candidate of Legal Sciences, Master of Law (LL.M), 

Senior Lecturer of the Department of Civil Procedure of the Ural State Law Academy

The article presents the author’s comment to the German Act to Promote Mediation and Other Methods of Out-of-court Dispute Resolution (Mediations G). The author notes that the main contentious issues in the adoption of the Acts was approved by the Acts existing practice of mediation by the German judges, as well as specific requirements for training and professional mediators. One of the main arguments was the claim that the procedure is carried out by the judges, for a maximum of two hours and consisted of one meeting that is not exactly mediation. Trying to take in such a short time the agreement is not always in the interest of both parties. It is a private community of mediators and lawyers insisted on the inclusion in the Acts the prohibition of mediation by judges and regulatory consolidation model of foreign judicial mediation, where the judge will have to direct the parties to conduct the mediation to a private mediator. For many years, the procedure of judicial mediation carried out free of charge and has proven to be effective. At the time of the discussion of the draft law judicial mediation was offered in most German regions, and has been successfully applied not only in general but also in specialized courts. 

Keywords: foreign law; mediation; civil process.