For Your Information
Access to justice through community services
Barrister Tapas K. Baul
Ensuring the right of all citizens to access justice is fundamental to achieving greater social and political equality within Bangladesh. In recognition of its importance, this right was enshrined as a 'fundamental right' in the Constitution by the framers.
This is also in keeping with the basic principles of democracy, equality and the rule of law that Bangladesh was founded upon and continues to strive towards.
Within this background, it is disheartening to note that in spite of various constitutional and legal guarantees protecting the basic rights of access to justice and fair trial, the State is not able to adequately and effectively ensure these rights to its citizens. Commentators have identified several reasons behind this failure of the state including ignorance of the law both among the enforcers of the law as well as those that it seeks to protect, lack of financial resources to adequately enforce the law, corrupt practices such as politicization and nepotism that are paralysing public institutions.
Recently, lack of coordination between NGOs and Government agencies at the grassroots level has been identified as a major obstacle to ensuring proper use of government or NGO funded legal services for the poor and marginalized all over the country. Therefore, joint efforts on the part of the Government and NGOs to facilitate access to justice for the poor and the marginalized have become imperative.
To achieve this goal, steps have to be taken to strengthen the existing community legal services. Legal services in this context refers to activities such as mediation, referral of cases for legal aid to Governmental and Non-Governmental legal aid providers, training of community paralegals, advocacy for pro-poor and gender friendly changes in policies and practices, filing PIL cases for the enforcement and expansive interpretation of basic rights of socially excluded groups, reviewing laws and policies affecting the poor and marginalized communities, action-oriented research programs that would inform and strengthen existing practices in CLS; activating Village Courts and Arbitration Councils and improving the delivery of legal aid at the district, upazilla and union parishad level and capacity building with a human rights or legal empowerment component.
Within this background, a program titled 'Community Legal Services' and targeted at making the right to access justice a reality for all citizens, is being launched on 8 December, 2012. CLS is a project supported by the Department for International Development (DFID), UK and implemented by a consortium of Maxwell Stamp PLC, as principal contractor, and the British Council and the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution (UK), as partners. It is a five-year program and its implementation period is from August 2012 to August 2017. The project will work through Bangladeshi non-governmental organizations in delivering legal services to the grassroots communities in Bangladesh focusing on community legal services, advocacy, research and capacity building. This program is also expected to contribute immensely towards the legal empowerment of those most in need of protection of their rights in Bangladesh.
The writer is a prosecutor, International Crimes Tribunal.
