Originally from the American Review of International Arbitration

The Singapore Convention on Mediation (more formally titled the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation) is a new multilateral treaty produced by the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL).  The Convention contains a framework for the cross-border recognition and enforcement of mediated settlements, designed to provide mediation with an analogue to the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The Convention opened for signature on August 7, 2019, with a record 46 countries (including the United States) signing on that day and five more signing in the next few months.  Thus, countries need to begin considering how to implement the Convention’s obligations in their domestic law. 

This article addresses the important question of implementation from the perspective of United States law and practice, seeking to identify the most appropriate method for U.S. implementation of the Singapore Convention by situating it among other private law treaties, for which implementation has been pursued in one of three ways.  First, for some private law treaties, clarification has been needed regarding the treaty’s interaction with existing federal law or uniform state law. In such cases, federal legislation to implement the treaty has been used (or proposed) to integrate the treaty’s rules with the earlier statutory regime. Second, some private law treaties may be perceived to alter the balance between state and federal law significantly enough that a cooperative federalism approach—incorporating both state and federal legislation using conditional preemption—may be seen as the most prudent course for implementation. Third, any other private law treaties not falling into either of the first two categories have been treated as self-executing.