African officials hail community courts for easing access to justice

KIGALI, Aug. 23 — Judicial experts meeting in Rwanda’s capital
city Kigali on Tuesday called for blending formal and traditional justice
systems to ease access to justice in Africa.

“We acknowledge the importance of justice institutions in promoting access
to justice but also realize the limitations of this formal system,” said
Abdulai Hamid Charm, the Chief Justice of Sierra Leone. “Legal
professionals need to collaborate with community-based justice institutions
to attend to those in most need of the services we provide,” he said. Charm
was speaking at the opening of a three-day continental conference on
collaboration between the judiciary and community justice institutions in
Kigali. The meeting drew participants from more than 15 countries across
the continent to discuss ways to strengthen collaboration between the
judiciary and community justice institutions.

Participants argued that majority of Africans live in rural areas with
limited means to access justice. Judicial officials from different African
countries are calling for ways to harmonize formal justice with community
justice systems in order to ease access to justice.Citing Rwanda’s gacaca
courts and mediation committees locally known as Abunzi, experts said this
could reduce court backlogs as well as help maintain harmony in the
community through amicable resolution of disputes.Rwanda has won much
praise for blending local conflict-resolution traditions with a modern
punitive legal system to deliver justice for the country’s 1994 genocide.
By the time of their closure in 2012, gacaca courts tried up to 1.9 million
cases in ten years. Scholars say this traditional system was successful in
swiftly delivering justice.

According to Mogoeng Mogoeng, the South African Chief Justice, access to
justice is still a problem particularly in Africa. He stressed the need to
make justice more accessible through capacity building to have
well-equipped paralegals who can interpret customary laws. Rwanda’s Chief
Justice Sam Rugege is hopeful that Africa’s traditional justice can be
improved and made more efficient to make a difference.He said there are
many barriers to access to mainstream justice such as poverty that leads to
inability to afford legal assistance and representation, ignorance of
rights, issues of culture and language problems in some countries. He said
community-based justice systems would help overcome many of the barriers to
justice since they are inexpensive, geographically more accessible,
informal, and culturally familiar.Though some cases can not be handled by
community-based justice, the majority of problems faced by Africans can be
resolved by community-based justice means, according to experts. – XINHUA