Back to sunny Zagreb last week for the first time in some years. I was there to represent ADR Group at the start of a new good EU-funded scheme to help spread modern Mediation practice and procedures in Croatia.

Croatia like many former Communist countries has vast traffic-jams in its justice system, with hundreds of thousands of cases rambling on inconclusively and unhappily for many years. Hence the idea that by developing Mediation – getting the parties to settle their differences themselves with some professional help – they can speed things up a bit.

One no-brainer reason for the courts’ backlog lies in a local procedure which to our British jurisprudential ears seems quite bewildering. In Croatia judges first hear the evidence of a witness, then have to dictate that evidence to the stenographer for the official record.

This (I was told by people who know the system) awesomely prolongs everything, both because in itself it is obviously far slower to do this simple job twice, but also because the parties’ lawyers can open arguments about whether what the judge said accurately reflected what the witness said.  

Still, even if judicial proceedings in that part of Europe tend to be rather sluggish, at least people keep themselves nice and clean.