Outline
Business executives and lawyers increasingly work across political and cultural boundaries. Neither trade nor investment can be guaranteed to be free of disputes, but the prospect of such disputes can be highly discouraging to much needed commerce. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular, would often like to do more business abroad. But they are frequently unfamiliar with, and distrustful of, the legal and judicial environment in other countries. Unless they know the alternative systems for preventing and managing disputes, they face a major obstacle to growing their business.
Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), and particularly mediation and arbitration, has proven effective in preventing and settling international commercial disputes. Arbitration and mediation, however, do not appear to be widely used in the MEDA Countries. The project Promotion of International Commercial Arbitration and other ADR Techniques in MEDA Countries is designed to improve understanding of ADR, to instill confidence and capacity in managing commercial dispute resolution, and to facilitate international trade and foreign investment in the 10 MEDA countries targeted by the project. These countries are dependent on SMEs to develop their economies; for trade and investment, the consequences of not having sound ADR systems in place are severe.
Our expectation is that, upon completion of project activities, a more solid mediation and arbitration infrastructure will be operational in the MEDA Region, enabling foreign businesses and legal counsel to more readily employ ADR, fostering valuable trade and investment.
MEDA countries, for purposes of this project, are grouped into three sub-regions:
- Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia
- Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and West Bank & Gaza
- Israel and Turkey