The Government approved the abrogation of a chapter from the Civil Procedure Code of the Republic of Moldova. The chapter refers to mandatory judicial mediation. This was adopted to reduce the workload of judges and to ensure faster solving of disputes, said Veronica Mihailov-Moraru, secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice. In time, it was ascertained that this method didn’t generate positive results. On the contrary, the workload of judges grew and delays were caused in the examination of pending cases. The free access to justice was also affected, IPN reports.

For example, only over 1,000 of the about 43,500 cases of judicial mediation the past four years ended with a transaction. In the rest of the cases, the mediation proceedings were stopped because the sides refused to solve the dispute by amicable ways, the time limit expired or the plaintiff dropped the charges. It was also determined that the mediation proceedings last for three to nine months and this is against the Civil Procedure Code, which stipulates that the judicial mediation cannot last longer than 45 days.

When the given chapter is excluded from the Civil Procedure Code, the mediation proceedings continuing when the law takes effect will be ended in accordance with the old law. But one or both of the sides of the dispute will be able to ask to immediately strop the mediation process and the case will be sent to court for being distributed to another judge or panel of judges at random.