NUJS emerges as winning Negotiation Team in IIMC Colombo

The world is steadily moving towards mediation as the main mechanism for dispute resolution for a vast array of fields. At this very juncture, the Moot Court Bench, Sri Lanka’s fully integrated legal advocacy training platform, in collaboration with the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNICTRAL), Sri Lanka Ministry of Justice, International Mediation Institute (IMI), Jus Mundi and Sage Mediation organized the World’s First Investor State Mediation Competition.

With participation from selected top universities from more than 10+ countries, India’s WBNUJS team emerged as the winners of this prestigious Mediation Competition.

The law school's team of Laksh Kawatra, Adya Bajpai, Tanish Arora and Sahaj Mathur was declared winners of the Negotiation Category. They faced four challenging preliminary rounds to qualify for the semi-finals and the finals. The team faced off against the City University of Hong Kong, Charles University, the University of Nigeria, and Allameh Tabataba, I in the four preliminary rounds. They were only the Indian Team to qualify for the out rounds. Laksh and Adya represented the team in the finals and defeated the team from National University of Singapore to clinch the title.

Speaking to Apprentice Lawyer, the team exclaimed that "Apart from the win, the improvement we can see in our ADR skills is immense and the kinds of connections we made with several judges, participants from the international fraternity of dispute resolution is our biggest takeaway from the competition.”

Speaking to Apprentice Lawyer, Laksh a team member and also the Convenor of NUJS ADR Society exclaimed- “the intersection between traditional mediation and the background of investor state law is what interested us the most and I hope moving forward we will more such competitions on similar intersections of mediation and other legal themes.”

The team said that this victory would not have been possible without the help of their coaches, Sushruti Tripathi and Akshit Goyal.

They also thanked all their seniors and batchmates who helped them immensely for the competition.

(This note was shared by Campus Ambassdor Amritansh)