GEMME Europe: How European Judges Started Promoting Mediation By Themselves

All the organizations I have previously written about share one common trait: they are built around the mediation process itself, serving as service providers, standardizers of mediator competence, or institutions that accept requests from parties and administer the procedure. GEMME (European Group of Magistrates for Mediation) stands apart from all of them because it is not an organization of mediators and not an organization for disputing parties. It is an association of judges who decided to promote mediation among their own colleagues from within the judicial system itself.

The paradox here is obvious: judges whose professional role is to make decisions voluntarily united to convince other judges to refer cases to a procedure that formally takes away part of their work. This very paradox makes GEMME a compelling topic for my series on mediation institutions.

The 2003 Paris Meeting

The full name of the organization in French is Groupement européen des magistrats pour la médiation, and in English it is usually translated as the European Association of Judges for Mediation. The founding date is tied to a specific location and person: on December 19, 2003, at the Court of Cassation in Paris, the first meeting took place under the leadership of Guy Canivet, who was then the First President of the French Court of Cassation, the highest judicial instance in the country for civil and criminal matters.

It is revealing that the initiative originated from top-level judges rather than from the bar or business associations, as was often the case with other organizations in this series. When the movement for a new dispute resolution practice is led by the First President of the national Court of Cassation, it immediately gives the initiative an institutional weight that a similar proposal from a private law firm or even a mediators’ association would lack.

More than sixty magistrates from seven European countries attended the meeting: fifteen from Belgium, thirty-five from France, six from Germany, one each from the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, and three from Italy. The predominance of French participants was natural given the venue, but the presence of judges from six other countries at the very first meeting shows that the vision had a European scale from the start.

Formal registration of the organization as a non-profit international association under French law was completed three months later in the spring of 2004. This time gap between the first meeting and formal registration is typical for such initiatives: first it was necessary to ensure that the interest of the participants would not be limited to a single meeting but would grow into a stable working structure, and only after that proceed to bureaucratic formalization. The symbolic legal address chosen was 5 Quai de l’Horloge in Paris, which is the address of the French Court of Cassation itself. The choice of location for registration shows that this was not a private initiative of individual enthusiasts, but a movement rooted in the highest level of the French judicial system from its very first day.

Twenty Years of Growth

Over more than twenty years, the organization has grown from seven founding countries to twenty-five countries, including observers, and over eight hundred members. This growth occurred not through centralized expansion from the Paris office, but through the gradual establishment of national sections in each new country where judges were ready to take the initiative for local representation of GEMME.

The model of national sections proved key to scaling the organization across the continent while maintaining sensitivity to the local context. Each country has its own legal tradition, its own societal attitude toward the judiciary, and its own history of using alternative dispute resolution methods, so a centralized Paris headquarters could hardly conduct effective outreach in twenty-five very different jurisdictions without delegating significant autonomy locally.

The observer status held by some countries in the structure of GEMME usually reflects an early stage of development of the local section: a group of judges who have shown interest and participate in pan-European activities of the organization, but have not yet formed a full-fledged national structure with its own statute and formal membership like the founding sections. Over time, some observers transition to full national sections, while others remain in observer status longer, depending on the pace of mediation culture development in their country.

Who Belongs to the Association

GEMME was created to work within the European Union and the European Free Trade Association. The main category of members, from which the name of the organization derives, consists of career judges specializing in civil, commercial, labor, family, and criminal law. Each specialization has its own logic for applying mediation: in family cases mediation is valuable for preserving relationships between parties after divorce or custody disputes, in commercial cases it allows preserving business relations between companies, and in labor disputes it helps avoid public escalation of conflict between employer and employee that is difficult to fully resolve even after a formal court decision.

Associate members can include lawyers, academics, and mediators, but the core of the organization, its voice in the public space and in relations with state institutions, is formed by judges. This is a fundamental difference from the other organizations I wrote about in this series. IMI sets standards for mediators. CEDR, ICC, WIPO, and EUIPO provide mediation services directly to parties. GEMME instead works with those who make daily decisions about the fate of cases in the judicial system and aims to change their professional mindset and daily practice from within.

Structurally, the organization is built as a network of national sections united under a common umbrella entity in Paris. Each national section has autonomy in how it promotes mediation in its country, taking into account the local legal context, public trust in the judicial system, and the culture surrounding alternative dispute resolution methods. The umbrella structure provides exchange of experience between sections, joint representation at the European level, and a unified vision of the organizational mission, while specific working tactics in each country remain at the discretion of local members.

Five Areas of Work

The activities of the organization can be divided into several areas, each answering one practical question: how to convince judges and society that mediation deserves trust.

Institutional Analytical Work

GEMME systematically participates in discussions with national, European, and international authorities, particularly in discussions on the implementation of the EU Mediation Directive in civil and commercial matters. The organization holds observer status with the Council of Europe, which provides a formal channel of influence on European justice policy rather than just a role as an outside commentator. This status allows GEMME representatives to participate in specialized discussions, submit positions on legislative initiatives, and maintain direct dialogue with policymakers responsible for alternative dispute resolution policy at the European level.

Analytical work also includes internal brain-trust sessions, which are regular meetings where representatives of different national sections exchange views on what legislative and procedural changes are needed in specific jurisdictions to make mediation a more practical option for judges examining cases daily.

Dissemination of Best Practices

Through conferences organized by various national sections, GEMME systematically collects and disseminates examples of what works in different jurisdictions. The Italian section has particularly valuable experience to share, as Italy introduced a mandatory mediation model and uses mediation far more frequently than the rest of Europe. This experience became the subject of separate discussions at GEMME conferences on whether other countries should adopt the Italian mandatory model or seek less compulsory ways to encourage mediation, considering that mandatory mediation causes debate among lawyers about its compatibility with the voluntary nature of mediation.

The conference format allows judges from different countries to directly share practical experience on how they present mediation proposals to parties during court sessions, which arguments prove most convincing to parties, which types of cases are best suited for mediation, and which should remain for standard court trial.

Educational Outreach

GEMME conducts broad information activities through its website, public forums, books, press articles, handbooks, colloquiums, and video materials aimed at both the legal community and the general public. The goal here is twofold: to raise public awareness about the availability of mediation and to change the established perception that going to state court is the only correct way to resolve a dispute.

This outreach targets not only potential parties to future disputes, but also lawyers who act as first advisers to clients when conflicts arise. If a lawyer by default advises a client to file a lawsuit without mentioning mediation as an option, the chance that the case will reach a mediator drops significantly before any court proceedings begin. Therefore, part of GEMME educational materials focuses on legal education and changing the habits of practicing lawyers.

Training Judges Who Refer Cases to Mediation

A distinct area of GEMME work is training mediation prescribers, who are the judges deciding in practice whether to propose mediation to parties before a case proceeds along the standard court path. This is organized through seminars and workshops in which GEMME either participates or acts as an initiator.

This work rests on a simple observation: even in countries where legislation explicitly allows or encourages judges to propose mediation to parties, the actual frequency of such proposals depends on the personal familiarity of a judge with how mediation works in practice and on personal confidence that it will yield a better result than standard litigation. Workshops organized by GEMME are designed to fill this gap in practical experience and trust, rather than just formal knowledge of the law.

Impact of the EU Mediation Directive

A new impetus to all GEMME work came from the EU Mediation Directive in civil and commercial matters, adopted on May 21, 2008: an organization founded before the directive gained a stronger institutional basis after its adoption for dialogue with national governments about practical implementation of European norms. The directive gave GEMME a concrete, legally binding document to reference in discussions with ministries of justice across countries, instead of appealing only to general arguments in favor of mediation.

At the same time, GEMME local experience in various countries revealed a major problem with the implementation of the directive: by various estimates, on average less than one percent of court cases in the European Union are resolved through mediation, despite the formal presence of a legislative framework in almost all member states. This gap between legal possibility and real practice is the challenge that daily work of national sections of GEMME aims to resolve.

“Mediation Meets Judges”: A Project Showing the GEMME Approach in Action

One of the most concrete and measurable projects of GEMME is the initiative titled “Mediation Meets Judges,” implemented with co-funding from the European Union together with EUROCHAMBRES (the association of European chambers of commerce and industry), nine chambers of commerce and mediation centers, and GEMME itself across seven countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Ireland, Italy, and Spain.

The project involved organizing forty workshops where judges and practicing mediators could meet directly, exchange best practices, and jointly promote the use of mediation in courts. Within the framework of the initiative, a set of practical tools was developed and discussed with judges of civil and commercial courts across Europe.

The ultimate goal of the project was to launch pilot court mediation programs in at least thirteen European regions: Andalusia, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Brussels, Dublin, Madrid, Marseille, Milan, Monza, Nicosia, Paris, Rennes, and Sofia. The choice of these regions was intentional: the organizers selected both major capital centers (Brussels, Madrid, Paris, Sofia, Nicosia, Dublin) and regional judicial districts (Andalusia, Bordeaux, Marseille, Milan, Monza, Rennes) to test whether the model works equally well in large jurisdictions with complex judicial bureaucracy and in smaller regional courts where personal connections between judges and local mediators are easier to establish.

This project illustrates the overall logic of GEMME: instead of calling for mediation abstractly through publications or public statements, the organization builds direct personal contacts between those who should refer cases to mediation, meaning the judges, and those who conduct mediation, meaning practicing mediators, in specific regions with measurable pilot programs as a result rather than generalized paper recommendations.

Internal Resistance Faced by GEMME

Participants in GEMME speak openly about the reasons why mediation takes root harder in some countries than in others, and these explanations deserve attention because they show real challenges rather than just official successes.

At an event commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the organization, representatives of a national section from one European country explained the logic of resistance: in a society where turning to a natural judge is historically perceived as the only legitimate way to resolve a private dispute, surrounded by institutional legal guarantees, there is no established social demand for a private mediator paid by the parties. This is especially true for countries with a high ratio of lawyers per capita where the legal profession traditionally dominates the conflict resolution culture and turning to an alternative out-of-court method may be perceived by part of society as a sign of weakness or distrust toward the legal system.

There is also an economic factor: in countries where litigation is relatively cheap or where parties are accustomed to court costs being covered by the losing party, the motivation to seek an alternative in paid mediation is naturally lower than in jurisdictions with expensive and lengthy litigation. Representatives of that section stated that they aim to change this mindset, taking inspiration from colleagues in other European GEMME sections, and that results of such a change manifest gradually step by step rather than overnight.

This openness is the most valuable trait of GEMME as an organization. Unlike marketing materials from commercial mediation providers, judges who voluntarily united in GEMME do not conceal how slow and difficult the process of cultural change can be, even when supported at the highest institutional level from the start.

The Place of GEMME Among Other Organizations in This Series

If we place all the organizations I wrote about on an informal scale of who influences whom, a clear picture emerges. CEDR, ICC ADR Centre, WIPO AMC, and EUIPO Mediation Centre directly influence the parties to specific disputes by providing mediation services. IMI influences the mediators themselves by establishing qualification standards that practitioners must meet. GEMME is unique because it influences the third side of the equation, the judges themselves, who are often the first and sometimes the only point of contact through which a party learns about mediation as an alternative to court litigation.

This is a fundamentally different type of influence: not a service, not a standard, but a change of professional culture from within a system that theoretically would compete with mediation for clients, meaning cases, but instead voluntarily tries to direct part of those cases toward mediation. The three types of organizations in this series complement each other in the same chain: GEMME convinces the judge to offer mediation, the parties turn to a service provider like CEDR, ICC, or WIPO, and the quality of the mediator assigned or recommended is ideally confirmed by standards such as those set by IMI.

That is why GEMME, despite its relative lack of publicity compared to large institutions like the ICC or WIPO, plays a critical role in the architecture of how mediation enters the view of disputing parties across Europe.

The history of GEMME shows another facet of the answer to the question I posed throughout this series of articles: what is actually needed for mediation to become a common practice rather than an exception in a given country. Rules and procedural documents written about when discussing CEDR, ICC, or WIPO are necessary but insufficient. Quality standards for mediators discussed in the article on IMI are also necessary but insufficient. It turns out that active voluntary work by people within the judicial system itself is also required, people who are ready to admit that some cases coming to them are better resolved outside the courtroom.

Judges who have voluntarily united since 2003 to promote an alternative to their own court offer strong proof of how seriously part of the European legal community takes the idea that the quality of justice is measured not by the number of verdicts rendered, but by how well society can resolve its conflicts, including methods that do not require a judge at all.