Oman has acceded to the UN Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation, becoming the 21st State party to the instrument better known as the Singapore Convention. The treaty enters into force for Oman on September 10, 2026 — six months after the deposit of its instrument of accession on March 10.
The accession continues a run of momentum for the Convention. Brazil ratified in August 2025, becoming the 19th party, with the treaty taking effect there in February 2026; Colombia and Kyrgyzstan have followed. The Convention now counts 74 signatories, and the club of full parties has grown past twenty.
For Asia, Gulf-state accessions matter more than the headline count suggests. Oman sits on trade corridors linking South and East Asia with the Middle East and East Africa, and enforceability of mediated settlements along those routes reduces friction for parties who would once have defaulted to arbitration — or litigation in an unfamiliar forum.
Each new ratification also compounds the network effect at the Convention's heart: the more jurisdictions in which a mediated settlement is directly enforceable, the stronger the commercial case for choosing mediation first.
