Professional Mediator for The New Alternative Dispute Resolution

Abstract

The Court of justice of Thailand has adopted the mediation system in conjunction with the hearings by issuing the regulation of the Judicial Administration Commission on Dispute Mediation since year B.E. 2544 concerning criteria and procedures of mediation. In this connection, there is an appointment of a person who has a duty of mediation called “conciliator” as a free service from the government provided to the disputing parties in which the conciliators are volunteers from outside who have received mediation training from the Court of Justice. Throughout these 20 years, Thailand has undergone various changes in all aspects, causing disputes at the Court of Justice to become more complicated and different from before, resulting in an unsuccessful mediation of cases with high monetary claims which are usually complicated cases. While in the United States, the private sector has an opportunity to set up an organization providing service of dispute mediation to the public with a fee or wage e.g., a private company called JAMS founded in the year 1979 in California, one of the largest companies that provide dispute mediation services with its strength of having a large number of retired judges and lawyers whose average age is above 65 work as professional mediators.

            From the study, it is found as follows: 1) The limitation of conciliators in mediating is that they are volunteers; despite receiving remuneration from the Court of Justice, still it is a small amount of 1,000 baht each time, not exceeding 6,000 baht for the whole case. Their career is not a mediator where it requires full responsibility and dedication to performing the duties; as a result, the work neither motivates those with talent to apply for nor contribute to the development of potential and knowledge in various fields. 2) On the other hand, the professional mediators of JAMS receive the remuneration at a rate of approximately 200 to 375 USD per hour, making it possible to have the competition and development of mediators’ potential despite the fact that Thailand has mediation processes that are hardly different from that of the United States. 3) Therefore, the professional mediator should be arranged at the Court of Justice in order to develop the dispute mediation to be more effective and as an alternative channel for the disputing parties other than the mediation processes by a conciliator. In this regard, there must be an establishment of the Association of Thai Professional Mediator (ATPM) to set up rules and the mediation processes to be more systematic with more professional standards whether in ethics or the competencies of professional mediators as well as monitoring and evaluating the performance.