New directions and trends
continues to find favour with the legislators and the role of judges continues to diminish insofar as the meting out of sentences is concerned.
The Singapore judiciary will continue to actively manage its case load to ensure timely hearing of cases and the quick disposal of disputes.
Technology will continue to be harnessed, moving the already efficient system to an even higher plane. Indeed, beyond having tremendous structural efficiency, the SinÂgapore legal system now has a huge body of local law that the Government believes will allow Singapore to become a major mediation and dispute resoluÂtion hub. This growth of alternative dispute resolution has been tremendous and the Government has identified it as being more consonant with Singapore’s Asian traditions and culture and has strongly supported it. Further encouragement has come in the form of the enactment of several laws. In 1986 Singapore acceded to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign ArbiÂtral Awards 1958, and in 2002 Parliament passed the International Arbitration Act incorporating the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Model Law on International CommercialArbitration. In 1991 the Singapore InterÂnational Arbitration Centre (SIAC) was established, and this was followed by the Singapore Mediation Centre (1997). The Permanent Court of Arbitration entered into a Host Country Agreement with Singapore in 2007, the InternaÂtional Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce is now represented in Singapore, and the International Centre for Dispute Resolutioni® (ICDR), the international division of the American Arbitration Association, also has a Singapore office.The increasing importance of Islamic banking and finance also offers another window of opportunity for the legal profession in Singapore.
In Southeast Asia alone, there are over 227 million Muslims, and with Singapore’s positioning as a major financial centre, the growth of this market offers lawyers specialisÂing in Islamic financial law a hitherto untapped potential. In 2006 the MoneÂtary Authority of Singapore allowed banks to engage in non-financial activities, such as commodity trading, to facilitate Murabahah transactions for clients’ investments.[1133]In an effort to raise Singapore’s international profile as a provider of legal services as well as to encourage parties to use Singapore law and Singapore as a centre for dispute resolution, the Singapore Academy of Law and the MinÂistry of Law launched the Singapore Law Committee under the chairmanship of Rajah J (as he then was) in 2006. In addition to attracting foreigners to use Singapore as a forum for the resolution of disputes, these various moves on emphasising mediation are also targeted at ensuring that Singapore does not become an overly-litigious society. At the local level, mediation culture has been buttressed by the establishment of Community Mediation Centres (in 1997) and the Neighbourhood Court (in 2008).