Update on community dispute management

Question

Assoc Prof Fatimah Lateef: To ask the Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth whether there are updates on the Ministry's review to consider compulsory mediation for community-related disputes. 

Mr Alex Yam Ziming: To ask the Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth in respect of a proposed Inter-Ministry framework for compulsory community mediation for disputes (a) whether public consultations have begun; (b) what progress has been made to date on the design of the framework; and (c) when will the framework be put in place. 
 
Response

Acting Minister Lawrence Wong: The Inter-agency Committee for Community Dispute Management started work and began stakeholder consultation on a framework for managing community disputes in July 2013. 

In developing the framework, one guiding principle is to uphold good neighbourly relations, and to ensure that residents take the responsibility to try to settle private disputes amicably among themselves first. This means that greater effort needs to be placed on strengthening neighbourly ties, and developing a culture of civic-mindedness and consideration for others so as to reduce the incidences of private disputes. 
 
When third party intervention is needed, mediation should be tried before resorting to legal means, since most disputing parties will still have to remain neighbours. The usefulness of a community-based approach such as mediation is borne out by the fact that approximately 70% of cases mediated at the Community Mediation Centre have had successful outcomes.

At the same time, we recognise that there are intractable cases where individuals are victims of highly inconsiderate neighbours. These cases may not be easily resolved through voluntary community mediation. Hence we plan to strengthen the legal and enforcement mechanisms to deal with such cases. In doing so, we are mindful of the risks of abuse, as an unreasonable party could use such mechanisms to victimise others, and this could lead to an escalation of the quarrels. Safeguards are therefore required to manage unreasonable complainants. 

MCCY intends to embark on wider public consultations on the community dispute resolution framework, before we finalise and implement it next year.