A committee was formed last week to promote mediation and offer workshops and courses to help lawyers, social workers and others to learn how to resolve differences through compromise rather than conflict.
The Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Committee was set up during a Federation of Women Lawyers' council meeting.
The federation's president, Anne Chen Wai-yui, said that organising training would be one of its major functions. She called for greater awareness of mediation and said Hong Kong should aim to become an ADR hub.
Sylvia Siu Wing-yee, former vice-president of the Hong Kong Institute of Arbitrators, was made committee chairman. Mediation is an alternative to litigation. It involves conflict negotiation, with the outcome fitting the needs of both parties, reached without an official court ruling. It is favoured in particular for handling divorce, creating less pain for all parties, in particular children.
Ms Siu, who is also one of three managing mediators of the Hong Kong Mediation Centre, said that despite progress in recent years, the level of awareness of mediation remained poor among lawyers and their clients.
Courses to be organised by the ADR committee will be available to members of the Federation of Women Lawyers. But there are an increasing number of other mediation courses available, for lawyers and others interested in the field.
'In Hong Kong we see quite a lot of construction arbitration and some family mediation, but we haven't pushed it further,' said Ms Siu. 'We could use it to solve neighbourhood disputes instead of calling the police and going to a small claims court.'