Aubbrey Wade in Makeshift:
For certain legal grievances, no judge or courtroom is needed to resolve — Justice Negotiators
In post-war Sierra Leone, ‘justice’ is a journey. Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world. A civil war ended more than a decade ago, but what little formal justice there was before the fighting proved hard to rebuild. Corruption influences all elements of the judicial system, and access to justice is as often a negotiation as it is a mandated legal process. Sierra Leone is the kind of place where paperwork gets done by hand, villagers come together to decide an offender’s fate, and vestiges of colonial governance still linger. Who you are and where you’re from matter. Formal and informal justice remain connected with a fluid and careful bargaining in which outcomes often have a negotiated price...[continue reading]
image via Makeshift
