Speech by Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs Edwin Tong SC at the SIMC Specialist Empanelment Ceremony 2025

Dear valued members and valued partners of SIMC,

1. Each of you bring your own expertise, your networks, and your deep experience in the areas that you serve. All of that helps us to grow the thought leadership, as well as the ability for the Singapore International Mediation Centre (SIMC) to serve the users even better. I am just going to take a leaf out of SIMC CEO Wee Meng’s speech earlier. He says, keep it informal and just make three points, so I will also just make three points.

2. The first is mediation is a really important aspect of dispute resolution. This is not just a way or a means of resolving a business dispute, but it is really a reflection of the Asian way of doing business, the Asian way of managing conflicts, and the way in which we look at a win-win situation, and try to find a way to, not just resolve the dispute, but also to find a way to preserve, if not grow, the relationship.

3. As some of you know, I spent many years as a litigator. When I was growing up as a young litigator, mediation and litigation were like opposite ends of the spectrum. If you want to litigate, then you litigate; you do not mediate. Every time the judges tell us to try and find a way to mediate, sit down and try to settle the case, we always give him a very funny look. But that was in the past.

4. Now I think we all appreciate that our role as legal counsel, our role as an in-house counsel is really to find solution. It is not to win the case, but to win the client. And ultimately, when it comes to winning the client, it means finding a solution that benefits the organisation for the long term.

5. Today, more so than ever, with the world so fractured, with so much of the world being driven by geopolitical tensions, economic disruptions, a lack of multilateralism, a desire to be inward looking, I think this option of finding solutions for our clients is even more important. In fact, I would say, really important. The role of counsel today, is not just to win the case, but to win the client.

6. Earlier on, Wee Meng mentioned that we have the Singapore Convention on Mediation (SCM). We are very proud in Singapore to have played a big part in it, instrumental in having the SCM signing ceremony take place in 2019, and we look forward to many more countries, not just signing up to the SCM, but also ratifying it so that we can build a stronger community around it.

7. As you know, mediation and the mediation agreements that we enter into will only take life, if it is something that more and more trading partners sign up to. So that is the first point I will make - mediation is important. If you forget everything else that I have said, just remember one line - we are here to solve the problem for the client, and not just to win the case.

8. The second point I want to make is I know there are many legal counsel, and many of you are involved in business across Asia, cross border. I want to say something about what is our priority for Singapore.

9. For us in Singapore, choice is really important – choice of dispute resolution mechanisms, whether it is litigation or arbitration or mediation. All of these are options that we want to avail the users of, we want to make it available to them. That’s why we see that there is Beijing International Arbitration Centre and Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC) present in this room as well. We do not see them as alternative, but complementary.

10. So, you would have heard of the Arb-Med-Arb (Arbitration-Mediation-Arbitration) provisions where you start an arbitration and you go through a mediation, and if you resolve the case, you can go back to the arbitrator, and record that as a arbitral award. These are ways in which we have innovated, we have found solutions to make both processes complementary.

11. But going back to my point, the key for Singapore is choice – choice for users. Whether it is a choice of different dispute resolution mechanisms, which I have just talked about, or choice of counsel.

12. We have been very embracing and open. We have had many foreign lawyers, including large Chinese firms practising in Singapore, and we see tremendous value. We, in the Ministry, engage with our foreign lawyers very often because they represent a different group of clients, they represent a different thinking. Sometimes, it is useful to understand what their thinking is, how we can develop our laws, even change our laws to adjust, to be commercially sensitive, and to move in the same way as the commercial industries have evolved so that we can keep up, we can be in tandem and we can support the growth of business. So, Singapore is a place where you can come in, you can be flexible.

13. We have also allowed for different options. The Singapore Government, of course, supports SIMC and the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC). But they are independent. We let them function independently because it is more important that they are independent, rather than they are supported by the government in a direct way. We give them all the support that they need, but ultimately the decisions they make – who is on their panel, who is on their Court of Arbitration, who is on their Board - these are all decisions that they make separately from us.

14. What is also important is, from our perspective in Singapore, choice also means choice of different institutions – whether it is SIAC or the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Centre if you have intellectual property disputes, the American Arbitration Association International Centre for Dispute Resolution (AAA), or INSOL if you have an insolvency situation, we have them present in Singapore.

15. So, we have a range of different institutions to allow us to develop thought leadership, build networks, and strengthen our ability to collaborate with the international community. So, choice in Singapore is my second point.

16. The third point really touches on why I am here today. Today, we are here to, of course, empanel our specialist mediators, but this is also my first trip out of Singapore after the shuffle in the Cabinet and the new term of Government.

17. China is a very important partner for Singapore. We have deep, longstanding and very established relations. My Prime Minister was just here last week. Prior to that, my previous Prime Minister had upgraded the Singapore-China relations to an “All Round High Quality Future Oriented Partnership”. We have got several Government-to-Government projects. We have got many provincial business councils, one of which I co-chair with Shanghai Mayor Gong Zheng, and we developed programmes, we developed deep people-to-people relations. On this trip, I met PRC Chief Justice yesterday. I have several meetings today, and it is important that we build this at a strong level, at the leadership level.

18. But equally important is the ability to build this at a people-to-people level. So, that’s my third point to all of you – the deep people-to-people relations. If you look around the room – Singapore lawyers, Chinese lawyers, business industry people, all intermixing with one another – this gives us the best platform to really grow and develop this relationship.

19. It is not a coincidence. It is something that we worked on for decades, and it is an important criteria for us that we look at the ground connections, because systems, structures and frameworks will only work if the people know each other well, get to know one another socially, informally, professionally, and then through these networks, be able to foster a shared sense of belonging in this space. Ultimately, if you look at the higher level, you are all serving the same cause. You are all trying to find a solution to a problem. You are all trying to find a way in which business investors feel confident about both our jurisdictions. They want to invest in China. They want to invest in Singapore. They must have the confidence that the system works.

20. So that overarching relationship between Singapore and China, and between the individuals and between people-to-people is something that I would like to emphasise. I hope that we continue to grow this, foster this, and take opportunities like what we have today – to not just build stronger networks of professionals, but deepen it a bit more to make it social as well. Once you have a deeper social connection, then the instructions will come, the affiliations will come, and the ability to coordinate, collaborate and cooperate will be much stronger.

21. So, on that note, I leave you those three points for you to think about. I did not want to make a long speech otherwise, but I look forward to recognising all of you on stage, all our specialist mediators who play a big role in being our ambassadors for mediation, and also to be able to socialise and see all of you informally over the course of the lunch.

22. Thank you very much.

Last updated on 1 July 2025