Imagine a place in which citizens have no available options for the redress of grievances except a corrupt formal justice system. What options for redress would there be for disadvantaged people working every day just to make ends meet? What if a saying you heard every day was,“there is no justice for the poor.” This is life in Liberia, where it is imperative that we work to make justice available and affordable to all. Supporting this goal, active citizens are raising the banner to support the rule of law and prevent conflict in support of SDG16.
In Liberia, there is a lack of public trust and confidence in the formal justice system to charge perpetrators and ensure justice for victims. Excessive bonds, legal fees, and bribes coupled with intimidating bureaucratic hurdles make the system financially and physically unavailable for many. As a result, long-term, unresolved resentments and anger often spark violence, such as ransacking police stations or pursuing mob justice.
We cannot continue to live this way- we must hold accountable the institutions responsible for implementing justice for all. We must come to the conclusion that charging someone for legal services who is living on less than a dollar a day is to deny that individual the justice they deserve. These people should not have to choose between bribing justice officials to pursue their case and rent, school fees, or meals. Something must be done to bring affordable justice to vulnerable people living environments that are often associated with tension and disputes.
These reasons are why I founded the Citizens’ Bureau. Through our Community Justice Teams-- with the financial support of the United Nations Development Programme and in partnership with the Accountability Lab, we have implemented an Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism which provides justice by resolving minor disputes in four low-income communities across Liberia: WestPoint and Logan Town in Montserrado County, Bassa Community in Margibi County, and Kokoyah Road in Bong County.
People of all ages and genders have benefitted from our mediation services. In 10 months, the four project locations have resolved 429 disputes, helping over 858 individuals who came to the mediation center either as a complainant or a defendant. Our mediation services handled a wide range of misunderstandings and disputes and transparently and fairly adjudicated them to the satisfaction of the parties.
We save citizens time and money by allowing them to conduct business and to allocate resources more productively, instead of being caught up in corrupt, slow and frustrating legal processes. Since pursuing an individual civil case within the formal justice system requires both bribes and legal fees, we estimate that each resolved case saves the impacted party about $300 USD, which is equivalent to the cost of rent for a year. Therefore, we estimate that in total we have saved citizens about $128,700 USD. This system pays for itself, which is why we think it is now ripe for what we think could be the 1st development impact bond in the justice sector.
The time we have saved them is as important. It takes three days (at a minimum- sometimes it takes years) to exhaust a case when navigating the formal justice system through both the police and the court combined. During this period of resolution party litigants have no option but to comply and appear in line with court mandate abandoning anything else.If we multiply 429 cases by 3 days this is 1,287 days or three and a half years. This is time that citizens can spend educating their children, contributing to the economy and re-building the country.
Against this backdrop, the mediators are trained to collaborate with the police and the court in conjunction with community leaders to solve legal disputes, raise awareness of justice issues and build trust from the bottom up within urban, poor, and insecure communities. The idea is not to undermine the formal legal system, but to support it- through pushing cases back down to communities that can be handled at that level, reducing waiting times and improving efficiency for others.
The importance of this effort in relation to SDG16 can not be overemphasized. Justice is at the heart of strong institutions and the rule of law everywhere. It will take decades to make the formal justice system affordable and accessible to everyone, but bottom-up community justice is fast, effective and complementary to longer-term efforts to consolidate legal structures.
In pictorial are community leaders and residents at a town hall meeting (in West Point one of our project locations) discussing feedback from the community survey which gauge the view of residents as regards to justice dispensation processes.
