November 5, 2026
A settlement is only as useful as the place where it can be enforced.
The Singapore Convention, formally the United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, lets a party ask the courts of a member State to enforce an international commercial settlement reached in mediation, under that State's own procedures. A party can also rely on the settlement there to show the dispute is already resolved.
In Latin America it is in force in Ecuador, Honduras, Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Brazil and, since September, Colombia.
What matters is where enforcement is sought, not where the parties come from. Unlike most enforcement treaties, the Convention does not depend on reciprocity.
For a U.S. company, that makes the fact that the United States has not ratified it less of an obstacle than it sounds. A U.S. company that settles in mediation with a company in Colombia or Brazil can ask the courts there, where the other side and its assets are, to enforce the agreement.
For a company in a ratifying country, the gain is mostly at home and in the region. If the other side brings the same dispute to its local courts, it can rely on the settlement to show the matter is resolved. If the other side has assets there, or in another member State such as Brazil or Ecuador, it can ask those courts to enforce. What it does not get is the Convention's help in U.S. courts, because the United States is not a party.
So the useful question is not where the agreement was signed. It is where the other side, and its assets, are.
The Convention also puts the mediator inside the enforcement chain. The first evidence it names that a settlement resulted from mediation is the mediator's signature on it. And a court may refuse relief if the mediator failed to disclose circumstances raising justifiable doubts about impartiality or independence, and that failure materially affected a party's decision to settle.
It does not cover everything. Consumer, family, inheritance and employment matters are excluded, and so are settlements approved by a court or recorded as an arbitral award.
The choice of neutral, and what that neutral disclosed at the start, can matter years later in a courtroom in another country.
Sources
United Nations Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (Singapore Convention), arts. 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8.
UNCITRAL, status table for the Convention.
Herbert Smith Freehills, “The new Singapore Convention: some practical issues to consider now” (September 2019).
Ariadne Latorre is a Florida Supreme Court certified mediator and a software engineer. She mediates business and commercial, insurance and risk allocation, LegalTech and information governance, HOA and community, and court-ordered matters, in English and Spanish, in Miami and virtually worldwide.