Radio Miraya
2841: Justice Ogoola: Implementing Judicial Reforms is Crucial to Avoid Costly Conflicts
It is a big pleasure and a privilege for Radio Miraya to have me here to talk about a very important subject, the subject of reform of the judiciary of South Sudan. The judiciary is one huge part of the state. The other parts are the executive, presidency, ministers, and civil service. The other arm, of course, is the legislature, parliament, past laws. But the third arm is the judiciary. And while South Sudan has been and continues to undergo transition in its governance mechanisms, we had neglected the area of judicial, beside the arm. Now, the authorities have come to say that that arm needs and deserves to be looked at carefully so that we can reform it, take it through the transition into what South Sudan will need a decision of everything else, and justice, because we are transitioning from a state of war, if you will, fighting disputes conflict. These will continue after the transition. And they will need, initially, that is modern, quipped, trained, resourced, financed, able to meet the challenges, first transition period. So, the judicial reform committee has been here for almost two years now, working very hard within itself, and with the people South Sudan, groups, foreign South Sudan, organizations, women, youth, leaders, political leaders, additional leaders, religious leaders, everybody in the country, all across the sector, to find what is wrong, if anything, with the judiciary now, and how do we, and we took a methodology of A, with the committee reading, the literature on this, the legislation that's available, the policies that are currently in operation, which you regulated the judiciary. When we were satisfied that we had sufficient knowledge and information about the president of the judiciary, from reading the documentation and the history and so on, we embarked on consultations with the people, and we went to the states where the people are, away from Juba, and we covered a number of states and administrative area, and we brought the feeling and the views of the people on this topic. The third method was, we then came back, piled all of that into a draft report, then we embarked now on the final chapter, which was validation of that report. Again, we called everybody representative of the people of South Sudan. The vice presidents came to the validation, the ministers, national ministers, state ministers came, governors, speakers came from the states and from the central government. We had academia, professors of law, lawyers, the bus association, individual lawyers, we had judges, we ended up with almost 100 plus people who came to Juba, and we sat conference for three days discussing draft, they gave us more views, generally they accepted everything we had recommended, improved on something that we had recommended, then the committee went back for another two or three days to incorporate the views of the validation. So what we have now is a final reflex, the views of the committee members, the views of those people that were consulted in the states and so on, and ultimately the views of those who came to the validation, the recommendations we have met, there are too many say them out, however we can highlight, there are probably two, three kinds of them, some are very easy in terms of understanding, for instance the number of judges is so little, we probably needed 200, but what we have in the system is hardly 50, so we need almost four times to have ideal numbers in all the courts of South Sudan, from the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, the High, and so on. Alongside that category of recommendations, we found that even the few judges that are still here, they are welfare, they are salaries, they are latency, their maintenance is very, very low, and this one does not encourage motivation to work, we understand for instance that they haven't been paid for long times of time, something like 11 months has been mentioned, I don't know if it's true or not, but the working conditions have been very, alongside in that category are the working spaces, courtrooms, the residences of judges, cards, if any, offices, library, books, and all that, so our recommendation that do a lot of putting all those things right. Category number two is bigger than that, even when we have all the judges, those numbers we have recommended, would they be up to the job, considering that we have gone through a transition for so long, do they have sufficient adequate and desirable training, whether at university before they became judges, after they became judges, they had an continuing education, do they have specialized training, we have recommended specialized courts, it's easy to talk of courts generic generally, if you want to be very efficient and effective, you may have to specialise those, for instance, commercial disputes, are different from criminal disputes, they require different kind of training and equipment and so on, so we have recommended that we do undertake a number of specialized courts, commercial land cases, whoever specialized attention, military courts of course are different from civilian labour, this is employers and employees, they're very special and so on and so forth, recommended, but from training, quipping the courts means things like computer, we are now in digital age, cannot continue to do business in the judiciary and the benefits of computerising are many, but basically it makes life easier, it makes the operations more effective, for instance, you don't have to have witnesses brought from far from malachal jubah, you can have the pictures taken in malachal and shown here on the screen in the cotton jubah, makes work easy, less costly, more effective, but it requires to teach training judges and the potential that they can be up to today. Now, that's one set of things, the other category of recommendations would go through creating new and more substantive issues, such as we, by the agreements, were required to set up a constitutional in South Sudan, we now have courts after the Supreme, which deal with everything, constitutional issues, criminal issues, land issues, name them, but it was felt that we need a special constitutional which you deal with only with matters of constituents to interpret the constitution, country, to apply it to deal maybe with impeachment, president, if that ever came up, if we have elections and there are disputes about electing a president or a governor, those petitions should go to the constitutional because they are very fundamental. Relationships between the states and the center, the constitutional matter, human rights issues, if someone feels that their human rights have been violated, international treaties, conventions, all that area is so basic country that they belong to a constitutional court rather than the ordinary. So we have recommendations on that. Equally, it's said that when the current constitutional making process takes off ends, there would be issues of federal nature of governance, will it be a deep federal, a slight federal, but with it will be the issue of what then happens to the court system, should the courts also be federal and centralized courts, statutory court. So we have recommendations on that issue, federal, depending on what decided politically, then we offer recommendations, kinds of courts could have principle. It would mean that the federal courts would deal with the federal matters, the state matters, each state has its own legislature and its own governor, then the laws made there better be dealt with by the courts in the states, made by the state. If the federal is not that deep, then maybe we go what is current now, that would be one set. So those are new areas in which we have made recommendations, but the totality of all those things is reformed, particularly for South Sudan. Maybe out then end this way, that those reforms being many and some of them very fundamental, they would require to address the issue of implementation. It's one thing to recommend all these things, but how do you ensure that it will be implemented and implemented in time? So we have provided a set of recommendations on how these things should be implemented. For instance, there are some of these recommendations that would require immediate action, like appointing judges quickly, like providing welfare, their salaries, so on. Those should be addressed very quickly. Very quickly here may mean within one year, one or two years, and continuing. There are those like the constitutional courts, which are required, and federal courts, which are required by the agreement to be established within the current transition, this language to that. So maybe those, if the current agreement continues, may be required to be established very quickly, before the transition ends, which means, as of now, before December 26th. There are other recommendations which might take longer. For instance, building new, constructing new court buildings and equipping the courts with computers and so on. And training judges, you cannot train a judge in one month, going to be a continuing thing. So some of those recommendations will take longer term, maybe three, four, five years, and even longer. If we are going to train the judges, we have to start with the lawyers at university. What sort of education, legal education, they're getting at university, which will bring them into this new, modern, reformed judiciary. And then they take off that, would take five, six years minimum. So in the implementation, we are recommending that these things be faced, some of them immediate, short term, some of them medium term, five years, others longer term, maybe five to ten years beyond it. But we are also recommending that they be a specific task force made out of very effective for in the country. Lawyers, administrators, political people, whose duty and obligation will be to look at all these recommendations, tell those who should implement them to do so. Many of our recommendations will require executive policy, change in policies. The task force will tell the executive government, please do this policy. Many of our recommendations would require making new laws or amending existing laws. That means going to the parliament laws. Again, this task force be responsible for reminding the legislature, parliament, to do their job. Many of these recommendations will require to be put in the constitution making process. For instance, you cannot create a constitution without putting it in the constitution itself created by act of parliament policy. It must be embedded in the constitution, because it's a basic requirement. You cannot provide for these federal courts we are talking about without making them and parcel of the constitution itself. So there will be recommendations that need to constitution making and this task force would have the duty to bring everybody up to date. I can see that some of these things will be carried out. I am confident of that because when we search people, they are very excited about all these things. When we had the validation, again, it was a full house. Everybody came, ambassadors came, ministers came, vice presidents came, lawyers came, judges came, ordinary people came and that to me was a message that they are dying for reform. So if they bring that enthusiasm to the authorities that have the power to make these reforms, then I can see that there is a chance of making those reforms. Maybe what we can also say here is that the totality of these reforms requires tremendous resources in terms of finance and budget. As of now, that may be a challenge, but over time, resources will have to be found because and I want to end on that note. Why are we doing all these reforms? Why is it important for the judiciary to be an effective mechanism in a country because when they are disputes, the civilized way to resolve disputes and conflict is to go to the courts of law and there will be peace. If you don't do that, then you leave this country to the risk people being disaffected by decisions, taking up guns and going back to the push, get a solution to their disputes. And God forbid, should that ever happen, then we may end up with a more costly way of solving our disputes than if we put our money into reforming the judiciary to resolve these disputes peacefully, harmoniously.