Accountability Lab Executive Director Blair Glencorse talks to John Kamma from the Citizens' Bureau about the challenges within the country's desperately under-resourced justice sector. Kamma facilitates the Lab's Community Justice Teams in the country and has so far resolved 400 cases through alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.
By: John Kamma, director of the Citizens Bureau in Logan Town, Liberia and an “accountapreneur” with the Accountability Lab. This blog post was originally published by HiiL Innovating Justice. At the time of writing, there are more questions than answers regarding the recent death of Victoria Zayzay in a jail cell at the Zone 6 police substation. She had been detained on October 20, 2015 after another woman claimed she had caused L$3,000 (US$40) property damage to her business. A preliminary police report by Liberia National Police said the cause of death was attempted suicide. The father of the late Zayzay has [...]
By: Brooks Marmon, Accountability Architect for Accountability Lab in Monrovia, Liberia. On August 5, nearly 20 community mediators supported by the Accountability Lab joined representatives from civil society, Liberia’s Ministry of Justice, and the United Nations Mission in Liberia to discuss “Informal Justice Interventions in the Time of Ebola”. The event, convened in partnership with the Hague Institute for Innovating Law (HiiL) with additional support from the Friends of Liberia, served as a dual training and reflection session to chart ways forward on how to meld the best aspects of Liberia’s formal justice system with informal legal procedures to ensure that [...]
By: Blair Glencorse and Anne Sophie Lambert. This blog post was originally published by the Local First Blog. For many Liberians living in the low-income, high-density neighborhoods of Monrovia, life is a daily struggle. Land disputes, drug problems, domestic abuse, and a lack of basic services, among other issues, are pervasive. When citizens face legal challenges, the lack of legitimacy, affordability, accessibility and timeliness of the formal justice system often prevents any feasible recourse. Extensive bureaucratic red tape coupled with transportation and legal costs, lawyer fees, and opportunity costs of foregone work make the justice system not only physically but [...]
