Issue 9. Firs half 2012

Intra-judiciary Mediation in the field of Civil Law is an auxiliary and complementary method for the administration of justice, which is specially useful for those conflicts the judiciary authority considers to be applied to in order to facilitate a solution of consensus. As a result of a mediation experience in one of the Madrid’s courts, the authors show in this article that mediation in civil matters becomes a very efficient, rapid and economic tool for a specific type of disputes whose commonality is an interruption of the communication between the parties.

A series of changes are occurring in today’s society concerning the evolution of family, the emergence of new roles among its members, and in intergenerational relations. This context of changes is not indifferent to the role grandparents have, and the importance these figures have in family relations is currently unquestionable. In this article, an approach to put the figure and the role of grandparents in the family and in the society context is presented. We will indicate how we can approach parental conflicts as vehicles of interference in the grandparents-children relationships, from a mediation and legal and forensic perspective.

In this article, we attempt to challenge the mediation model as an appropriate model to be used with certain types of families at the Family Meeting Centre. Firstly, a presentation is made about the definition of the Family Meeting Point as a specialised service that favours the emotional adjustment of the children who live in the midst of a family change process as a result of a divorce or separation by means of the appropriate compliance with the visits scheme by non custody parents. The Transitional Mediation model is identified as an intervention method aimed at meeting the goals of the service, i.e. the normalisation of the visits scheme. In this article, the success of the Transitional Mediation when applied at the Meeting Point with a specific profile of user families is confirmed; to support this confirmation, the results obtained in an unprecedented survey conducted by the author between 2005 and 2007 are also presented.

In a difficult separation it is important to be able to act and use all the tools available to minimise the impact of a crisis upon the family members, especially the youngest ones. Family Meeting Points should not exist other than as a last resource. The challenge that have to face professionals working with families where a high level of conflicts have occurred is to be able to prevent their attendance to the Family Meeting Point; however, if families cannot avoid attending there, this should be at least for a limited length of time. Of one the ways in which we can contribute with the families to solve separation-related problems is to use mediation actions that might be useful to pave the way towards intra-judiciary mediation.

In this article, the authors want to show the possibilities Family Meeting Points offer in order to implement mediation actions. To do this, a set of case Studies have been selected, in which Mediation is used, among others, as an intervention method, and also in which positive goals have been set for them to be used in addressing common family conflicts in Family Meeting Points. Firstly, a presentation of each case is made by briefly introducing the family situation and the causes that made them to attend the Family Meeting Point. Then, an analysis of the intervention is made for each case, focusing on the goals, principles and mediation techniques used. To conclude, the authors present the results obtained in each case study.

One of the issues that worry human beings the most is dying, avoiding, if possible, unnecessary suffering. Except for the cases in which someone has clearly expressed his/her will in this regard, by means of the so-called «living will,» when the time arrives to start administering certain treatments or removing them, it is up to the health care team and/or the relatives of the patient to determine what to do. The dilemma of curing or caring often gives place to discrepancies among all of them, and it is sometimes difficult to reach a consensus. In such cases, call on a Court of Justice decision does not always solve the real underlying problem, and can make the conflict to last for ever.