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The effect of court-mandated mediation on the length of court proceedings in the Czech Republic

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Abstract

The article explores the use of mediation in custody and civil disputes in court practice in the Czech Republic. The option for a court to order mediation in a dispute was enabled by the Mediation Act of 2012, with the proclaimed benefit of shortening the length of the dispute. We put these claims to test using data provided by the Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic based on the so-called statistical sheets of district and regional courts. The dataset covers over 2 million custody and civil disputes resolved between 2013 and 2018. Descriptive analysis reveals that the courts’ use of mediation is still sporadic and regionally clustered. Regression analyses show that, contrary to the expectations, the custody (civil) disputes with mandated mediation were on average 3 (2.5) times longer than their counterparts without mediation, after accounting for several control variables. This effect varies over time and with the dispute’s subject matter.

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Data availability

Data were provided by the Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic and are only available at official request from the ministry.

Code availability

The Stata code that was used to obtain all regression results is attached as the Supplementary Material.

Notes

  1. See e. g. the Decision of the European Court of Human Rights, 8th February 2018, Case Žirovnický vs. The Czech Republic, Application No. 10092/13.

  2. Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21st May 2008 on certain aspects of mediation in civil and commercial matters.

  3. See Roberts and Moscati (2020), Steffek et al., (2014) for a more detailed historical overview.

  4. Although Gross (2013) argues that in certain cases, even agreement is not necessary for medation to be considered a success.

  5. In fact, even the reluctance of many of the EU member states to make wider use of mediation might stem from concerns about its performance.

  6. In De Palo et al. (2014), a material published by the EU, one can read that the so-called mediation paradox had not been solved as of 2014. Despite its advantages, mediation in civil and commercial cases was used in less than 1% of cases across Europe.

  7. To compare, an earlier survey from Scotland (Scottish Consumer Council 2005) reports a much larger figure of 57%.

  8. Adversarial tradition and the lack of a mediation culture in some of the EU member states is explicitly recognized as a barrier to a functioning mediation system by the European Parliament resolution of 12 September 2017 on the implementation of the Mediation Directive (Resolution 2018/C337).

  9. Only four public universities in the Czech Republic have a designated faculty of law; as of 2021, public universities account for over 90% of current university students in the Czech Republic.

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Funding

The article was elaborated as part of a research project of the Czech Science Foundation called “Conditions for Mediation Practices in the Czech Republic pursuant to the Mediation Act“, registered under number GA 18-014175. JZ acknowledges long-term support from the institutional research fund of the Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, Prague Unversity of Economics and Business (No. IP400040).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Prague University of Economics and Business, W. Churchill Sq. 1938/4, 130 67, Prague 3, Žižkov, Czech Republic

    Dagmar Brožová

  2. Department of Econometrics, Prague University of Economics and Business, W. Churchill Sq. 1938/4, 130 67, Prague 3, Žižkov, Czech Republic

    Jan Zouhar

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  1. Dagmar Brožová
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Brožová, D., Zouhar, J. The effect of court-mandated mediation on the length of court proceedings in the Czech Republic. Eur J Law Econ 53, 485–508 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-022-09729-6

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