Volume 8 – 2015, No. 1

Attention is drawn to the need that mediation professionals should use the strategies and abilities acquired to exercising their professional activity to both their daily life and the professional field, where relational conflicts and clashes of interests are common. It is not that mediators cannot have conflicts, as normally understood in our field, but rather that they need to take actions to correctly manage their own conflicts. The author outlines his own techniques and strategies to be used in this process that puts mediators at the centre of their own conflicts: communication skills, narrative construction, allied seeking, «PIN» diagram (Positions, Interests, Needs), the contributions of Transactional Analysis, and externalisation, among other.

This article deals with the ability of narrative intervention to transform the stories of the persons who resort to mediation. It aims at demystifying the required neutrality for mediators to intervene in a dispute presented by the parties in a conflict. Hypothesizing during the initial interview facilitates the discourse of the parties and contributes to reduce uncertainty about the process. The mediation intervention occurs in an encounter space created thanks to impartiality and equidistance, with mediation strategies like the understanding of the circular causality in family relationships proposed by the circular-narrative school and the transformative school. A link between mediation and resilience, as shown in this article, may be established.

Over the last decades, coexistence issues at school have been and still are the focus of social and educational attention. School mediation programmes have consolidated as an effective procedure to improve coexistence. However, in most of the cases, the approach to conflicts and the actions taken to address them are still rooted in a more traditional punishing approach. Restorative justice programmes promote a shift in the penalising culture as a way to order coexistence in centres, by pushing for reparations and taking responsibility not only of the facts but especially with regards to solution seeking. Through a comparative analysis of the evaluations carried out among the restorative justice programmes of 67 schools in the United Kingdom, we were able to identify the key elements for its implementation as well as transference to our education context.

The use of penal mediation implies a change of mentality in an already highly Court-centred society that considers Courts se the only way to solve conflicts. Criminal law aims to clarify whether the alleged facts existed or not, and what is the defendant’s degree of responsibility. Mediation has a different approach: it pursues the victim and the offender’s own recognition of a conflict, seeking to achieve a restoration settlement that allows the victim to be satisfied, and the perpetrator to be reintegrated into society. With regards to the problem of aliens in terms of the penal law, and the current trend to expel them from the territory, it is possible to use penal mediation and mediation for relational conflicts in aliens’ detention centres. It is suggested in this paper that restorative justice and mediation do not constitute new systems of administering criminal justice but that they relate to customary justice systems.

«Unlawful acts», or their perception in the sense of «direct violence acts», in other words, the violation of norms as «the accepted rules of the game», are not an exception but rather the legal requirement of all the legal «pharmacopeia» of ADR, including mediation, are another tool. The tasks of a mediator, like those of policymakers and many other that are not necessarily carried out by legal experts, is a legal task as they cooperate in that the parties settle to put an end to conflicts. Rejecting the norm because of the incorporation of mediator in the field of gender-based violence requires rethinking it from an axiological perspective, and this article is just a first approach to it.

The European Council issued Directive 2008/52/CE of the European Parliament and the Council on May 21, 2008 dealing with different aspects on mediation in civil and commercial matters as an attempt to encourage the use of mediation. Directives are binding norms for all Member States in terms of the results to be achieved, but each State is free to develop its own domestic legislation to achieve this. We analyse the situation of the mediation in each country of the European Union and we see that using mediation is not equal in each nation although rare in practically all of them. The Council, aware of the numerous advantages and benefits of mediation for both individuals and the Administration, is rightly thinking to take measures that will oblige the Member States to start encouraging mediation in a serious and efficient way.