Critical examinations of efforts to make governments more efficient and responsive Political upheavals and civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have obscured efforts by many countries in the region to reform their public sectors. Unwieldy, unresponsive—and often corrupt—governments across the region have faced new pressure, not least from their publics, to improve the quality of public services and open up their decisionmaking processes. Some of these reform efforts were under way and at least partly successful before the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2010. Reform efforts have continued in some countries despite the many upheavals since then. This book offers a comprehensive assessment of a wide range of reform efforts in nine countries. In six cases the reforms targeted core systems of government: Jordan's restructuring of cabinet operations, the Palestinian Authority's revision of public financial management, Morocco's voluntary retirement program, human resource management reforms in Lebanon, an e-governance initiative in Dubai, and attempts to improve transparency in Tunisia. Five other reform efforts tackled line departments of government, among them Egypt's attempt to improve tax collection and Saudi Arabia's work to improve service delivery and bill collection. Some of these reform efforts were more successful than others. This book examines both the good and the bad, looking not only at what each reform accomplished but at how it was implemented. The result is a series of useful lessons on how public sector reforms can be adopted in MENA.
This book considers how access to justice is affected by restrictions to legal aid budgets and increasingly prescriptive service guidelines. As common law jurisdictions, England and Wales and Australia, share similar ideals, policies and practices, but they differ in aspects of their legal and political culture, in the nature of the communities they serve and in their approaches to providing access to justice. These jurisdictions thus provide us with different perspectives on what constitutes justice and how we might seek to overcome the burgeoning crisis in unmet legal need. The book fills an important gap in existing scholarship as the first to bring together new empirical and theoretical knowledge examining different responses to legal aid crises both in the domestic and comparative contexts, across criminal, civil and family law. It achieves this by examining the broader social, political, legal, health and welfare impacts of legal aid cuts and prescriptive service guidelines. Across both jurisdictions, this work suggests that it is the most vulnerable groups who lose out in the way the law now operates in the twenty-first century. This book is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and policymakers interested in criminal and civil justice, access to justice, the provision of legal assistance and legal aid.
This publication defines the nature and characteristics of traditional justice systems, including issues related to jurisdiction, community involvement, composition, and a primary focus on restorative justice.
Land Law Reform in East Africa reviews development and changes in the statutory land laws of 7 countries in Eastern Africa over the period 1961 – 2011. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 sets up the conceptual framework for consideration of the reforms, and pursues a contrast between transformational and traditional developments; where the former aim at change designed to ensure social justice in land laws, and the latter aim to continue the overall thrust of colonial approaches to land laws and land administration. Part 2 provides an in-depth and critical survey of the land law reforms introduced into each country during the era of land law reform which commenced around 1990. The overall effect of the reforms has, Patrick McAuslan argues, been traditional: it was colonial policy to move towards land markets, individualisation of land tenure and the demise of customary tenure, all of which characterise the post 1990 reforms. The culmination of over 50 years of working in this area, Land Law Reform in East Africa will be invaluable reading for scholars of land law, and of law and development more generally.
The provision of legal technical assistance has in recent years become a major concern for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, and for Western-based bilateral donor agencies. This book offers critical perspectives for the evaluation of legal technical assistance projects and contains proposals for action and research. Five chapters offer general perspectives on law, state and civil society and the remaining six case studies on themes such as economic regulation, agrarian reform, representation of women and access to justice.
The United Nations estimates that four billion people worldwide live outside the protection of the law. These people can be driven from their land, intimidated by violence, and excluded from society. This book is about community paralegals - sometimes called barefoot lawyers - who demystify law and empower people to advocate for themselves. These paralegals date back to 1950s South Africa and are active today in many countries, but their role has largely been ignored by researchers. Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice is the first book on the subject. Focusing on paralegal movements in six countries, Vivek Maru, Varun Gauri, and their coauthors have collected rich, vivid stories of paralegals helping people to take on injustice, from domestic violence to unlawful mining to denial of wages. From these stories emerges evidence of what works and how. The insights in the book will be of immense value in the global fight for universal justice. This title is also available as Open Access.
Countries emerging from armed conflict or authoritarian rule face difficult questions about what to do with public employees who perpetrated past human rights abuses and the institutional structures that allowed such abuses to happen. Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies examines the transitional reform known as "vetting"-the process by which abusive or corrupt employees are excluded from public office. More than a means of punishing individuals, vetting represents an important transitional justice measure aimed at reforming institutions and preventing the recurrence of abuses. The book is the culmination of a multiyear project headed by the International Center for Transitional Justice that included human rights lawyers, experts on police and judicial reform, and scholars of transitional justice and reconciliation. It features case studies of Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and South Africa, as well as chapters on due process, information management, and intersections between other institutional reforms.
The African human rights system has undergone some remarkable developments since the adoption of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, the cornerstone of the African human rights system, in June 1981. The year2011 marked the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the African Charter. It also marked 25 years since the African Charter entered into force on 21 October 1986.This book aims to provide reflections on most of the major human rights issues in the past 30 years of the African human rights system in practice and discussion on the future: the African Charter s impact and contribution to the respect, protection and promotion of human rights in Africa; the contemporary challenges faced by the African Human rights system in responding adequately to the demands of rapidly evolving African societies; and how the African human rights system can be strengthened in the future to ensure that the human rights protected in the African Charter, as developed in the jurisprudence of the African Commission since the Commission was inaugurated in 1987, are realised in practice.The chapters in this volume bring together the work of 20 human rights scholars and practitioners, with expertise in human rights in Africa, under the following general themes: rights and duties in the African Charter; rights of the vulnerable under the African system; implementation mechanisms for human rights in Africa; and towards an effective African regional human rights system.