CJ Mutunga set to launch mediation system in Judiciary

Chief Justice Willy Mutunga will Thursday launch the mediation system for dispute resolution in the Judiciary to reduce backlog of cases.

A pilot project was conducted last month for cases in the family and commercial divisions of the High Court following the gazetting of Mediation rules last year.

According to Chief Registrar Anne Amadi, the Judiciary aims at reducing backlog of cases filed in court, cut time taken to settle disputes and also free judges from taking longer periods to write judgments.

“There have been calls for the introduction of alternative methods of dispute resolution as a viable and acceptable option to litigation, we consider this a great time in the history of the judiciary and the practice of law,” Ms Amadi said.

A report on the mediation pilot project by the Judiciary Training Institute shows countries, such as Uganda and Nigeria, that adopted mediation in 2011 have recorded high success rate in solving disputes.

In Kenya, 90 judges were expected to handle 58,000 cases filed in the High Court in 2014. This translates to 645 cases per judge.

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Kenya's ratio of one judge to the general population is at 1 to 80,000.

Other countries have more judges serving the population.

UK’s ratio is 1:10,000, Brazil 1:14,000 while Uganda stands at 1:50,000; which means that Kenya needs more judges in order to sufficiently serve the country’s population.

The report reveals that the reason why these countries have less cases in the corridors of justice is because most cases are settled using Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanism which has enabled judges to take shorter time to write their decisions in good time hence they are able to handle all matters in good time.

Apart from the new cases filed, the existing ongoing pending cases for the last 18 months as of January 2015, were 600,007.

This large number of the pending cases would mean that each of the judges would have to be allocated 6,000-7,000 cases besides the new ones filed.

Should the project succeed, the judiciary seeks to implement mediation for the cases filed at the Employment and Labour Relations Court as well as the Environment and Lands Court.

In mediation, parties pay less compared to legal payments for cases in court.

The mediation team will be based at the Cooperative Bank House in Nairobi.