THE Pacific Judicial Council held a three-day mediation and settlement training at Kensington Hotel on Oct. 26-28, 2022.
The council is a regional organization of judicial officers from Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the FSM states of Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap, American Samoa and the Republic of Palau.
Guam Superior Court Judge Arthur Barcinas, the council’s education committee member, said the training on mediation and settlement techniques aimed to help people resolve their disputes, “other than…going to court and spending a lot of money doing that.”
“There is a trend, and mediation is increasing,” he added. “Because the [number of] cases are increasing as…we come out of the Covid-19 pandemic, we want to be prepared to meet that demand.”
He noted that the traditional legal process is long and expensive.
Everyone recognizes that, he said, so cases that have a good probability of being settled are sent to a mediator “to see if the parties can work out a resolution that is acceptable to them and arrived at by them, and not by a judge making [a] decision.”
The presenters at the training were District Court for the NMI Magistrate Judge Heather Kennedy, San Francisco Magistrate Judge Ken Newman, and Kyungah “Kay” Suk, a Ninth Circuit mediator.
Asked whether there are jurisdictional issues, Judge Barcinas said, “The beauty of mediation is there is no set standard. It’s all about being creative in working with the parties, to allow them to come up with a resolution for their own problem.”
In the traditional court, he said, “we are bound by the law and the procedure process that was set out by individual jurisdictions.”
Mediation is more flexible and more creative, Barcinas added. “We recognize that our obligations are to always try to make justice more efficient, more affordable, timelier, and to help the parties resolve the problems so they can move on….”
Kosrae State Court Mediation Chairman Sigra Paliknoa told Variety that he attended the training to further improve the mediation program in Kosrae.
The former College of Micronesia official added, “I’m really fortunate that I came to this training so that I can learn more about the stages of the mediation process.”
According to Paliknoa, they started the mediation program in Kosrae more than 10 years ago. “It really helped our court system,” he said.
Sigra Paliknoa
