UG Laws Essay Competition 2025 – Reflections from our winner 

We are delighted to share this blog post featuring the reflections of the first-place winner of the UG Laws Essay Competition 2025. In this blog post Muhammad Wali Anwaar Kharal offers an insightful look into his experience of taking part in the competition—from the initial idea to the final submission. We extend our sincere thanks to all participants whose thoughtful and creative entries made this year’s competition strong. We hope you take inspiration from this blog post and we encourage you to enter the competition in 2026.  

When I first saw the topic, “The Internationalisation of Mediation: Facilitating Access to Justice and Global Legal Harmonisation?”, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Mediation had always seemed to me a local, almost intimate process-something which was inherently rooted within a community. Thinking about it through a global lens was like being asked to reconcile instinct with structure. Could a process built on empathy, flexibility, and cultural practices ever truly become international without losing its soul? 

My research thus started with UNCITRAL Model Law and the Singapore Convention on Mediation. The clarity they provided also presented the paradox that became central to my essay: global rules are meant to bring order, yet mediation thrives on fluidity. Reading about systems such as the Panchayat in South Asia and Sulha in the Middle East made me realize that internationalization doesn’t have to mean homogenisation. In fact, it can mean listening across cultures rather than speaking over them. The idea that global harmonisation may coexist with local wisdom took root in my mind and became the thread that tied everything together for my essay. 

The essay demanded a common ground that would establish a delicate balance between academia and practice. I remember pausing over a passage on enforceability in the Singapore Convention and thinking of Panchayat, where reconciliation rests not on legal authority but on social trust. Could those two forms of justice ever be reconciled? The answer is yes, mediation, while on paper an international concept, has a relevance and presence in every society, in some shape, way, or form. Each form of mediation embodies a philosophy of justice, whether relational or procedural, and it was within that dissonance that my argument found rhythm. 

In retrospect, I would attempt to refine the structure sooner. My early drafts were exposition-heavy, a symptom of confusing comprehensiveness with depth, I believe. It took me some time to realise that clarity doesn’t come from attempting to address every aspect of the law but from coherence and consistency in what I was trying to establish. I also learned the best essays are not those that drown in citations but where each source feels like it enters upon the page as a necessary voice in a conversation. 

To students who may consider entering any essay competition in the future, my advice would be to find what actually provokes your curiosity within the topic. You can’t write persuasively about something you don’t care about. Good writing is less about inspiration than revision; distance from your draft for a while honestly gives you the perspective to see what isn’t working. 

Of course, winning this competition was gratifying, but more important was what the process taught me: that law, like mediation, is not about rules but about dialogue and communication above all. Above all, I realized that finding one’s voice in law was less about choosing a side than it was about learning to listen: to arguments, to perspectives, and perhaps most importantly of all, to silences between them.