Machteld Pel has been an Appellate Court judge and vice-president (commercial and family cases) for 22 years until March 2010. Previously she was a district court judge for 8 years and she has been teaching on different subjects of Law and Judiciary skills in the University and the school for judges in the past 30 years.
ADR Experience
- An arbitrator and a qualified mediator (NMI certification) and mediator-trainer, she arbitrates and mediates contract, commercial, employment, education, medical, and family matters.
- Machteld Pel teaches in the National School for judges on Judicial settlement skills and on conflict-diagnosis and is a frequent trainer of mediators and lawyers. Machteld Pel also trains groups of professionals in communication and leadership skills.
- Machteld Pel is a supervisor of judges in different courts concerning their settlement skills and the referral to mediation-tool. She is a frequent author and speaker in different countries on effective dispute resolution, conflict-diagnosis, and conflict management. In addition, she is a consultant on designing dispute management systems and an adviser on specific conflict issues.
- Machteld Pel is a member of the independent standards commission of the International Mediation Institute. She has been the director of the Netherlands court-annexed mediation-agency from 1999-2010. She was instrumental in starting and supervising the court annexed-mediation project in the Netherlands from 1999 on. She was supervising the implementation and consolidation of the referring faculty in all the courts in the Netherlands as well as the monitoring of its results. She was asked as an expert or consultant on these topics in various European countries as well as in Russia and the Middle East. In 2010, she received a royal decoration for her work and is an officer in the order of Orange-Nassau.
- Machteld Pel has designed different courses for judges, lawyers, and mediators on referring to mediation, on conflict-diagnosis and skills and on judicial settlement. She is the designer of a new type of court session where the judge follows a specific method of conflict-diagnosis in order to help the parties and their lawyers to find the best way of conflict-resolving in the specific case: settlement, mediation, or decision. She has designed – in cooperation with academics of different background – a training course for judges, lawyers, and mediators on this topic where they get a theoretical basis and a training with actors to get accustomed to this new way of working. Furthermore, she is operating some specific experiments where judges cooperate with mediators in a court-session in order to get a quick scan of the conflict and to be able to choose the best way of conflict resolving: a legal decision, a settlement, or a mediated outcome.
Publications
- Court-Based Mediation in the Netherlands: Research, Evaluation and Future Expectations, Bert Niemeijer and Machteld Pel, Penn State Law Review, November 2005, Vol.110:2, p 101-135 (11.155)
- Referral to Mediation, a practical guide for an effective mediation proposal, April 2008, SDU The Hague (amazon.com) (also in Netherlands edition and translated into Russian, Slovenian and Turkish language)
- Family Mediation in The Netherlands, Machteld Pel, Cees van Leuven, Gea Brands-Bottema en Marieke Hendriks, International Family Law, November 2009, Jordan Publishing LTD, p 255-259
Background and Education
- Judge and Vice-President, Arnhem Court of Appeal
- LL.M. at the Faculty of Law, Groningen University
- Bachelor’s degree, Amsterdam University School of Law
Events
| DATE | TITLE |
|---|---|
| 18/4/2012 | JAMS International panellists to speak at 14th Annual Spring Conference for ABA Dispute Resolution | Washington, DC, United States |
