Mediated Settlements in Ukraine: What Actually Makes One Enforceable

Cross-border disputes | JVS Law

In July 2014 this page reported a proposal. The United States had asked UNCITRAL to draft a convention that would let settlements reached in mediation cross borders the way the New York Convention lets arbitral awards cross them. The proposal worked. The convention exists, it is in force, and it is named after Singapore.

It will not help you against a Ukrainian counterparty. Something else will, and it has been available the whole time.

Working Group II took the file. Four and a half years later the General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation — resolution 73/198 of 20 December 2018. It opened for signature in Singapore on 7 August 2019 and entered into force on 12 September 2020.

The mechanism is the one the American delegation sketched in its 2014 paper. A written settlement agreement, resulting from mediation, resolving a commercial dispute that is international: a court in any Contracting State grants relief on it directly. The creditor produces the agreement and evidence that it came out of mediation (Article 4); the court may refuse only on the closed list in Article 5. No fresh action on the contract, no re-litigation of the underlying dispute.

Twenty-two states have ratified it. Ukraine is not one of them.

Ukraine signed on the opening day — 7 August 2019 — and the signature has remained a signature ever since. That distinction is not a technicality. A treaty that Ukraine has signed but not ratified is not part of Ukrainian law, and a Ukrainian judge asked to apply it has nothing to apply. Check the status table before anyone tells you otherwise; it changes, and it will eventually change for Ukraine.

Ukraine has had a mediation statute since December 2021 — the Law of Ukraine “On Mediation” No. 1875-IX of 16 November 2021, in force from 15 December 2021. It is a competent piece of drafting. It defines the mediator, the confidentiality regime, the contents of the settlement agreement (Article 21: the obligations agreed, the manner and time limits for performing them, and the consequences of failing to).

What it does not do is make the agreement enforceable. The Law answers the question itself, in Article 18(1)(6), where it lists the rights of the parties: where the settlement is not performed, a party may apply to a court, an arbitral tribunal or an international commercial arbitration in the manner established by law.

Read that again as a creditor. You spent the time and the fee, you reached agreement, the other side signed — and the remedy the statute gives you for breach is the same remedy you had before you started. A mediated settlement in Ukraine is a contract. Breaching it gives you a claim, not a writ.

This is precisely the gap the Singapore Convention was built to close, and precisely why ratification matters more here than the drafting of any domestic rule.

Both convert the settlement into something an enforcement officer will act on. Both existed before the Singapore Convention was drafted, and neither depends on it.

Route one — have the court approve it. Under Article 46(7) of the Commercial Procedure Code, as amended by the mediation law, the parties may settle “including through mediation” at any stage of the proceedings, and the result may be recorded as a settlement agreement before the court. The court approves it by a ruling that sets out the terms in the operative part and closes the case (Article 192(4)). Then Article 193(2): the ruling approving the settlement is itself an enforcement document. If the debtor does not perform, it goes straight to enforcement (Article 193(3)).

Two things worth knowing about this route. The court will refuse approval if the terms are contrary to law, prejudice third parties, or are unenforceable (Article 192(5)(1)) — so a settlement drafted in the language of intentions rather than sums and dates will not survive the hearing. And where the settlement was reached through mediation, 60 per cent of the court fee comes back (Article 130 of the Commercial Procedure Code, Article 142 of the Civil Procedure Code, Article 7 of the Law “On Court Fee”). The obvious limitation: this route needs a case in a Ukrainian court. Mediation conducted before anyone sues cannot use it.

Route two — have the tribunal record it as an award. Article 30 of the Law of Ukraine “On International Commercial Arbitration”, amended by the same 2021 law to say expressly “including through mediation”: if the parties settle during the arbitration, the tribunal terminates the proceedings and, at their request, records the settlement as an award on agreed terms. Article 30(2) then does the work — such an award “has the same force and is subject to enforcement in the same way as any other award on the merits of the dispute”.

Which places it inside the 1958 New York Convention: 172 states parties, and Ukraine among the original signatories from 29 December 1958. The instrument the Americans in 2014 held up as the model — one that took sixty years to imitate for mediation — is already open to you, provided your contract has an arbitration clause.

So the practical sequence, where the clause exists, inverts the usual one. Commence arbitration first. Mediate inside it. If it settles, ask the tribunal for an award on agreed terms. You end up holding exactly what the Singapore Convention promises, obtained through a treaty Ukraine ratified in 1960.

Mediation does not suspend the limitation period. Article 263 of the Civil Code lists the grounds for suspension — force majeure, a statutory moratorium, suspension of the governing act, service in the armed forces under martial law — and the 2021 law did not add mediation to them. In administrative matters the drafters said it out loud: conducting mediation does not affect the time limit for applying to the court (Article 122(6) of the Code of Administrative Procedure).

Two provisions of the Civil Code answer this, and both have to be used deliberately.

• Article 259 — the parties may extend the limitation period by written agreement. (They may not shorten it.) Sign that before the first session, not after the settlement falls apart.
• Article 264 — the period is interrupted by an act acknowledging the debt, and starts afresh. A settlement in which the debtor acknowledges the sum does this by itself; time already elapsed is not counted.

If a case is already on foot, the court may stay it for mediation — Articles 227(1)(3-1) and 229(1)(3-1) of the Commercial Procedure Code, Articles 251(1)(4-1) and 253(1)(3-1) of the Civil Procedure Code — but for no more than ninety days. Mediation that needs longer runs alongside a live case, not instead of it.

One more, easy to trip over when the same firm handles both stages: a person who acted as mediator in the dispute cannot then represent a party in the related court case (Article 59(3) of the Commercial Procedure Code, Article 61(3) of the Civil Procedure Code, Article 58(3) of the Code of Administrative Procedure).

• Where are the assets that will actually pay you? If they are in Ukraine, the enforceability question is a Ukrainian one, and the Singapore Convention is not part of the answer — whatever the mediation provider’s brochure says.
• Is there an arbitration clause? If yes, route two is available and is the stronger of the two. If not, one of the things worth settling at the mediation is the clause itself: Article 21(2) of the mediation law expressly allows the agreement to go beyond the subject matter of the dispute.
• Is there a case in court? Then route one, and 60 per cent of the fee back.
• Limitation. Extend it in writing before mediation starts.
• Draft it as if it will be enforced. Sums, dates, consequences of non-performance — in the form a judge could lift into the operative part of a ruling. That is the same discipline Article 21 of the mediation law and Article 192(5) of the Commercial Procedure Code demand from opposite directions.

First published in July 2014 as a note on the United States proposal to UNCITRAL, tabled for the Commission’s forty-seventh session in New York (A/CN.9/822). Rewritten in August 2026, once the proposal had become a convention and Ukraine had a mediation statute; the law is stated as at that date.

The author has spent his career on the stage where an agreement either turns into money or does not — the textbooks International Commercial Arbitration and International Civil Procedure, and the recognition and enforcement of foreign awards in Ukrainian courts. Mediation is the part of that map where the enforcement stage is still missing, which is why the ratification question is not academic.