Abstract
The 2006 ICG report changed the political situation for justice practitioners involved in designing Liberia’s justice reform strategy. The report found that customary justice practices and conflict resolution mechanisms were effective and enjoyed widespread legitimacy while the statutory system did not. The report therefore concluded that customary justice practices must form an integral part of Liberia’s justice strategy. Following its publication, the Liberian Minister of Justice, Frances Johnson Morris, reached out to TCC and asked them to participate in developing the Access to Justice Initiative (A2J). The A2J Initiative called for a spectrum of peacebuilding interventions designed to reach out to rural communities where customary practices predominate, to work with chiefs in order to enhance their conflict resolution capacities and to gradually bridge the gap between customary and statutory systems. This A2J Initiative was also a part of the broader Security Sector Reform strategy designed to integrate the regional justice and security hubs with surrounding communities through networks of CSOs. This strategy required TCC to cultivate working relationships with chiefs who administered justice in their communities
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Notes
Deborah Isser, ‘The Problem with Problematizing Legal Pluralism: Lessons From the Field’, in Legal Pluralism and Development: Scholars and Practitioners in Dialogue, ed. Brian Z. Tamanaha, Caroline Sage, and Michael Woolcock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237.
Stephen C. Lubkemann, Deborah Isser and Philip A. Z. Banks, ‘Unintended Consequences: Constraint of Customary Justice in Post-Conflict Liberia’, in Customary Justice and the Rule of Law in War-Torn Societies, ed. Deborah Isser, Peacebuilding and the Rule of Law (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), 202.
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Brian Z. Tamanaha, ‘A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Empowerment’, Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 2 (June 2000): 299.
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© 2015 Julian Graef
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Graef, J. (2015). Translating Statutory Justice into Legal Empowerment. In: Practicing Post-Liberal Peacebuilding. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491046_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491046_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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