THE Chief Justice has held up mediation as an effective way of solving disputes.

And he backed this with figures to show its impressive success rates - of up to an astounding 97 per cent.

Speaking at the launch of the new Centre of Dispute Resolution at the Singapore Management University on Thursday morning, CJ Chan Sek Keong pointed out that the Singapore Mediation Centre successfully settled 73.77 per cent of the 1,140 cases from 1997 to March this year.

He also noted that the Subordinate Courts helped to settle 90.4 per cent of the 80,016 cases that came before it for mediation between 1994 and last December, while the Small Claims Tribunal notched a 85.7 per cent success rate for its 6,103 cases between 2002 and last year.

The highest success rate was 97 per cent achieved by the Maintenance Court in the 3,907 spousal disputes it handled from 2002 to last year.

These figures reflect that mediation and arbitration have become part of the civil justice system here, said CJ Chan, .

The new centre can promote Singapore as an arbitration hub in the region, he said.

The head of the new centre, Associate Professor Ian Macduff said that the centre would focus on organising training courses in mediation to SMU students and promoting research.

More than 60 guests, including several Supreme Court judges, and practitioners of mediation and arbitration, attended the launch held at SMU.