In March, the JSCA team traveled to Bogotá to meet with the Colombian and Peruvian consulting teams working on the project “Civil and Family Dispute Resolution Mechanisms and Their Effectiveness in Colombia and Peru. The project has gathered information on the functioning of Alternative Dispute Resolution Mechanisms (ADR) through interviews with authorities, officials and users of mediation and conciliation centers.
JSCA’s consulting teams in both countries have been deployed for more than two months in 15 territories, some in the jungle and Andean areas of Colombia and Peru, and have conducted more than 200 interviews.
They have diagnosed problems in the operation of conciliation centers, such as the lack of standards in the structure of the buildings, the sometimes deficient training of conciliators, and the litigious cultures in both countries, which often lead people to choose to go directly to court rather than seek agreements.
This project is extremely important since most of the cases handled by mediation and conciliation centers are for child support and child custody.
During the trip to Bogota, both teams worked on the preparation of the final reports and the drafting of the public policy proposal to strengthen mediation in the countries of the continent.