By: Staff Writer
March 23, 2021
The International and Western Hemisphere, Arbitration Adjudication and Mediation Centre (IWHAAM) will have its historic and “transformative” launch this coming Friday said former Bar Association president of The Bahamas.
Dr Peter Maynard, managing partner of Peter D Maynard & Co, event organiser, said about the inaugural meeting of IWHAAM that this “transformative,” inaugural launch was being developed over the past two decades with the idea of reducing the backlog of cases dealing with dispute settlement matters.
Dr Maynard said: “IWHAAM started off with the idea that you really ought to have alternative means of settling our disputes to deal with case backlogs.”
“Other ideas involved were with the factory line of young Black men to prison in the Bahamas primarily and instituted a system of restorative justice that was advocated by the Roman Catholic Bishop at the time, Archbishop Lawrence Burke, then endorsed by the entire religious community as a an urgent need.”
Restorative justice has also been endorsed by the academic community in The Bahamas with the University of The Bahamas having commissioned several studies on young men in the prison system as a way to dig deeper into the phenomenon of Afro male violence.
The former Bar Association of The Bahamas also said, “We also find origins in the maritime sector. The Ship Owners Association was largely responsible for the Bahamas signing on to the New York Convention on the automatic enforcement of arbitral Awards in the first decade of this century, and so all of these influences have been brought together in the summits which every year since 2012.”
The arbitration and investment summit for the Caribbean, Latin America and Emerging Markets will also be celebrating its 10th anniversary next year, Dr Maynard also said. The summit has played host to several key players in the arbitration world, for example, the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce Secretary General Annette Magnusson and a host of other regional players. With Stockholm Sweden as his “Scandinavian Tiger” of arbitration being a world leader through the SCC.
Dr Maynard added: “Assisting centres and bringing centres together has been a consistent theme of the summit. So there has been an evolution.”
“At one point, it was hoped that the Bahamas would be the exclusive centre in the region. That ship has sailed with many other jurisdictions have their own centres now,” added Dr Maynard with Trinidad having a centre along with the French Caribbean having the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in the Caribbean (OHADAC), along with centres in Barbados, the British Virgin Islands and Jamaica. In North-America, there are vibrant arbitration centres in Miami, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia.
Dr Maynard, hopeful for this Friday’s inaugural launch of the IWHAAM in The Bahamas, also said: “So in terms of the landscape, we feel that the Bahamas can still be very significant in the area of arbitration, because we have stretched such a strong core of professionals, meaning not only lawyers, and arbitrators, adjudicators and mediators, but also other professionals.
We engage in the fields such as architects, engineers, surveyors and so on. And so, the concept behind it is basically that we ought to cultivate and to develop a culture of efficient, effective peaceful dispute resolution. He also said: “The idea is to change the country, not only to address our individual concerns in various sectors, but in particular to change the mindset towards dealing with our disputes effectively.”