Opening Address by Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Edwin Tong SC, at the Institute of International Mediators (iiM) Annual Conference 2026

Dr Lim Lan Yuan, President of iiM

Mr Tito Isaac, Vice-President of iiM

Friends and Colleagues

Distinguished Guests

Ladies and Gentlemen

Introduction

1. Thank you very much for the warm welcome. Good morning, everyone.

2. Very good to be back here at the iiM Conference. Earlier, you heard Dr Lim say that this is the third edition. Do you remember which years were the earlier editions? 2018, 2022, and now 2026. What stands out about these three editions in these years? These are the World Cup years! When I was preparing for this speech, and was looking at when I was last here, I realise you hold your conference once in four years, like the World Cup.

3. Somehow, that seems very fitting, because both mediation and the World Cup have something fundamental in common, and that is a clear set of rules that everyone understands, plays by and trusts, because the rules make the outcomes acceptable. If you go through a framework that has rules that are acceptable, people understand it, it is clear and transparent, when the outcomes are generated by those processes, people accept it. I think that’s the similarity between what we do here in mediation and of course, events like the World Cup.

4. This principle — that trust in outcomes flows from trust in rules — underpins every legal system that we have sought to build in Singapore.

SGLaw200

5. This year, in Singapore, we mark the Bicentennial – 200 years since we received the Second Charter of Justice, back in 1826. Two centuries ago, the English common law was introduced into Singapore, but we did not keep it static. We kept it moving – nuancing it, contextualising it, understanding how Singapore evolved. Our social values, our community outcomes, are all part of our rules that we have inherited, but have slowly evolved them to fit Singapore.

6. For two centuries, what we have done is adapted these laws to achieve the outcomes we have today – strong rule of law, safety, security, economic progress, vibrancy, and a strong sense of social cohesion.

7. In doing so, we have always placed society above individual. That is the hallmark of our laws in Singapore, and we have always sought to encourage cohesion and harmony. If you look around today with the global conflicts that you see, it is all the more important that we strive towards a communal sense of cohesion, harmony, safety and security.

8. Some of these laws are quite direct. If you take the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) for example, it ensures that in every community and micro-community, even though Singapore is very small, you will see a cross-section of all Singaporeans. Whatever race, background, religion, we come together, we see each other in the lift lobby, in the hawker centre, in the shops, the malls, the play spaces around us, playgrounds where our children grow up. This is a hallmark of Singapore. We use a policy like the EIP to foster that sense of belonging and a sense of cohesion.

9. We also have the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act. It allows early intervention when tensions arise, which some may view as perhaps going strictly beyond a reactive legal model, but we do it differently. We set out what the principles are for cohesion, for religious harmony, and we, by and large, respect these lines and boundaries within which we operate as a community.

10. What makes these policies acceptable is not just the intent behind it, not just the desire to drive cohesion, but also how they are applied — fairly, uniformly, no one is above the law, clear, transparent, and well-understood.

11. This approach of how we have taken the laws in Singapore is what has enabled Singapore to grow into a trusted hub for business, investment, and also, I would say, increasingly, for dispute resolution.

Dispute Resolution

12. But we did not arrive here overnight.

13. As you know, we started many years ago with arbitration. We opened up our legal system, our legal jurisdiction. We liberalised our regime to allow foreign lawyers to participate in arbitration — giving choice of counsel, choice of rules, and choice of governing law.

14. We built strong institutions like the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC). Many of them today are housed at Maxwell Chambers down at Tanjong Pagar, where we put the best and the most advanced of international thought leaders in dispute resolution in one place at Maxwell Chambers.

15. We then expanded into international mediation with the Singapore International Mediation Centre (SIMC), recognising that not all disputes are best resolved through the adversarial process, which you might find in courts or in arbitration. But some, as you heard from Dr Lim earlier, really deserves that special intuition and judgement that you all as mediators can give, to bring about resolution.

16. It is this flexibility and the value of being able to preserve relationships even in conflict, allowing for creative solutions, focusing on outcomes that work for all parties, even if these outcomes might perhaps not be available if you look at arbitration or litigation. I think that is the true value of mediation.

17. This flexibility makes mediation today especially valuable, because today’s world is highly interconnected, and we are dealing with cross border trade between parties, which sometimes come from different jurisdictions, which have cultural differences but connecting with one another.

18. I think using mediation to bring parties closer together, even in conflict, is a really valuable skill.

19. That is why we have supported global frameworks as well, including the Singapore Convention on Mediation. Some years ago, before COVID-19, we came together. We pushed the Singapore Convention on Mediation for uniformity of rules across different countries, allowing a mediated settlement agreement to have cross border enforceability. The Convention provides the certainty that mediation needed to unlock its full potential.

20. Today, this Convention is signed by 59 countries and ratified by 21 Parties, with more considering adoption. In my meetings with counterparts whenever I travel overseas, I try to persuade them to think about adopting and ratifying it, because the more countries come onboard this Convention, the more we are connected, and the more we are able to do cross border trade.

21. When you do cross border trade, you expect some degree of conflict. When you can resolve it by mediation, and you know with confidence that you can settle something across border and have it enforceable across jurisdictions, that makes mediation a lot more acceptable.

22. I understand that today we have participants, experts from different parts of the world. I encourage you, when you go back to your countries, to ask your governments to also bring onboard your ratification, as well as your signature. I think this will be a big step for us to the adoption of the Convention.

Mediation in Singapore

23. But beyond international mediation, mediation has also grown significantly in the domestic arena.

24. In Singapore, once upon a time when I was still a practising lawyer, parties and counsel like myself had to be encouraged and maybe cajoled and incentivised to try mediation to settle a case in court. But today, I find that it is increasingly chosen as an option willingly by parties, and much of it has got to do with the growth of mediation, but also the excellent standards of mediators that we have, and that we have seen.

25. Since its introduction in 1994, mediation has taken root across all court levels, even at the Appellate Division and at the Court of Appeal. Sometimes you might wonder, after you have gone through a trial, there is already an outcome, you are at the Court of Appeal, how is it that you can still do mediation? But even then, the Appellate judges say, you still try. Even though there is already a result, you still try because a consensual outcome is – if you can arrive at it, it is always better than one that is adversarial.

26. I think that is the principle behind why you all do what you do.

27. In many ways, mediation is therefore no longer a last resort; many cases now adopt this and mediation has been proven to be effective. I’ll just give you some latest numbers from 2025. Last year, there was a settlement rate of around 70% achieved across 700 cases that underwent and were concluded through formal mediation at the State Courts.

28. This number shows that it is effective. It saves time, it saves costs, and most importantly, it preserves the relationships that parties have spent many years, if not decades, building up.

29. Mediation in Singapore also goes beyond just having commercial value.

30. We are a densely populated city. We live close by one another. In our housing precincts, generally, you have neighbours very close to one another. Small issues — sometimes noise, sometimes smells in a shared spaces, sometimes your shoe creeps over to my front door, there is a little bit of friction that happens. Sometimes, if you do not nip it in the bud, that friction, starting small, can grow bigger and bigger by the day. And in today’s landscape, especially with social media, it amplifies misunderstandings. They can spread quickly, and sometimes perhaps disproportionately, and then positions can harden very fast. Because if you publish something on social media about your neighbour, what would they do? They will publish something back about you. You push your shoes near to me, I will push my shoes near to you as well.

31. So small disagreements can be amplified into broader tensions that sometimes make it harder to solve. You recall what I said earlier about our laws and our system, trying always, as far as we can, to achieve social cohesion and public order.

32. So in my view, mediation provides us with a constructive way of being able to manage these differences, restore communication, bring parties back, leave aside all the rhetoric and focus on the fact that actually, we are neighbours. For all the disputes that we have, we are neighbours, and we live beside one another.

33. Our Community Mediation Centre (CMC) shows the success of this first-hand, with around 80% of cases going to CMC successfully mediated. It shows that if you bring parties together, they know that they are neighbours, they know that they are contracting parties, they know that they have got to work with one another, mediation tends to be successful.

1. It is therefore a natural first step in resolving community disputes, and overall, preserving that very important social fabric and trust in Singapore.

Community Disputes Management Framework

35. Yet at the same time, if you leave it to parties willingly, they are less willing. Our statistics show that fewer than 30% of cases registered with CMC proceed to mediation. Sometimes, there is still maybe a bit of pride. Who moves first? Am I showing weakness? Do I lose face? So only 30% of the cases that end up at CMC proceed to mediation.

36. We studied this, and to address this, we put in place legislative changes. We made amendments to the Community Disputes Management Framework (CDMF) last year, to allow directed mediation in suitable cases.

37. Under this framework, authorised public officers can now require parties to mandatorily attend mediation. The most important criteria here is that this is not about determining whose fault or who is liable. It is not about that. It is about finding a solution that is common to both. Therefore, officers do not need to establish who is right or who is wrong or inquire into fault before issuing a Mediation Direction (MD).

38. Where issues persist, the Community Relations Unit (CRU) can then issue abatement orders to address the underlying nuisance directly.

39. Let me explain how this works. If two neighbours are having a disagreement, and we think that it is suitable to go to mediation, officers, either from HDB or PA, can propose that they go to mediation, and it will be a compulsory mediation session. That means they have to attend.

40. If you look at my numbers that I cited earlier, if you do end up attending, the chance of settling is actually quite high. So actually, the first step that is important is to bring the parties to mediation before one of you, as experienced mediators.

41. If along the way, the noise or the disagreement or the smell or whatever is the disamenity continues, then the CRU can say, pending the mediation, stop it so that we do not escalate further. We do not make it worse in the meantime, and you give parties the best chance of being able to find resolution at the mediation.

42. The MD as well as the CRU frameworks have already been piloted in HDB estates in Tampines over the past year. We studied its effectiveness, how to iron out some of the kinks, how to deal with the process itself, before we decide how we can roll it out across all of Singapore. During this period, our agencies gained valuable insights, they understood how the process works, and also are now refining their processes and workflows, as I said, before we extend it to other parts of Singapore.

43. If we do expand this framework, it means that there will be greater demands on all of you, on our mediators, as well as on our community leaders. Greater demand, but I think this is the best way, the best forum, to solve community disagreements.

Call to Action

44. That is why I conclude by talking about all of you here today, and also about iiM today.

45. I believe that all of you, you are not just mediation practitioners. You are ambassadors of dialogue, of understanding, and of problem-solving, shaping how disputes can be addressed locally and across borders as well.

46. I encourage all of you to take what you learn here back to your own respective communities. Some of you here are leaders in your own spaces - either in the grassroots community, in the social spaces, in the volunteer spaces. All of you ought to serve as champions of mediation as an option of best choice, sharing your expertise with younger mediators, and also supporting frameworks like the Singapore Convention of Mediation as well as the CDMF.

47. In particular, the iiM, as a global body, has a particularly important role to play, by connecting mediators across different jurisdictions, learning from one another. No one has a monopoly over good ideas or good techniques. We learn from one another, we apply our own intuition and judgment into each case, promote best practices, and advocate for mediation in policy circles. All of this will help to build a world where disputes are managed not through confrontation or adversary, but through collaboration and cooperation.

Closing

48. I believe that mediation sits at the heart of Singapore’s ethos. We are a very advanced jurisdiction when it comes to the laws and legal system. Our judiciary is first class. Our principles of how we resolve disputes, building Singapore into a dispute resolution hub, all that is important, but I think mediation sits at the heart of this process, because ultimately and fundamentally, we want to resolve disputes in a way which preserve the relationships as far as we can.

49. But these instincts don’t come about by chance. They are habits that are cultivated over time – through the laws that we set up, the institutions that we built up, and the quiet practice of multiple generations of Singaporeans who choose dialogue over conflict. That has been our style, that has been our value, and that has been the way in which we have run Singapore as a cohesive, multi-cultural, multi-religious, harmonious society.

50. It reflects our belief that even in moments of disagreement, solutions are best found through understanding, trust and mutual respect. We can never give that up. We might disagree on that occasion, on that conflict in the contract, or in the way in which you might find that disagreement, but we can never give up the fact that we live as Singaporeans or with our friends from overseas in Singapore, side by side. It is that mutual trust that stands at the heart of why we want to drive mediation as a valuable ethos to solving our conflicts.

51. At the start, I spoke about the World Cup – 2026 is World Cup year again, where rules make outcomes acceptable. But it is the players, ultimately, in each team, that decides on the results.

52. So the same applies for mediation. The framework that we have, the rules that we have, gives mediation the legitimacy. But it is each of you, as mediators in each case, as we hear the parties and think about the solution that shapes the outcomes, who drive the results.

53. That is why gatherings like this really matter a lot. They bring people together to learn from one another, best practices as I said, strengthen a global community of mediators, find resources and exchange ideas.

54. So I hope you will take advantage of the conversations and connections. As much as it is important to listen to all the people on stage, including me, it is also important that you build connections and networks outside, over coffee, over lunch, where you understand from one another, and perhaps build networks so that we can connect with each other as mediators across different groups.

55. On that note, I wish all of you a very fruitful conference today, and maybe I’ll see you at the next World Cup year.