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NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner

Mapping Gender-based Violence and Access to Justice: Retraditionalization in Liberia (GENTRA)

Alternative title: Seksualisert og kjønnsbasert vold i Liberia: en empirisk kartlegging av rettssystemene i Liberia

Awarded: NOK 3.1 mill.

Project Number:

230271

Application Type:

Project Period:

2014 - 2018

Funding received from:

Partner countries:

The fight against sexual violence has been a main objective for the UN in Liberia, while we have studied what the situation is for women affected by sexual violence and their opportunities to seek justice through the judicial system. We also aimed to contribute to capacity building through establishing a database of the legal practice concerning sexual violence. All activities in the project have been in close collaboration with our Liberian partners, the Kofi Annan Institute for Conflict Transformation at the University of Liberia and the Platform for dialogue and Peace (P4DP), and the database is established by the Kofi Annan Centre. Unfortunately, the efforts of the UN are not consistent with results achieved. The main reasons is that the UN almost exclusively have directed their attention to the formal judicial system and ignored the traditional justice system. This is unfortunate as this is the only legal system that is available to most people. The reason for this is that judges and legal workers are absent in large parts of the country. They prefer to stay in the capital Monrovia. Police are rarely paid salaries, and lack basic equipment to conduct investigation such as cars, motorcycles and petrol are lacking. This implies that ordinary Liberians must seek justice elsewhere, and what they have available are the traditional courts. These are based on traditional ways of dealing with punishment, sanctions and questions of justice. However, while this is referred to as traditional courts, this does not mean that their legal practices do not change. It does so and traditional courts in contemporary Liberia are very different from those that operated before the civil war erupted. Our findings from Nimba County and Grand Bassa County show that, although the categories of situation, offence and offenders that these court use are not accordance with principles of modern law, they also have many things in common. Traditional courts offer ordinary citizens access to justice that does not threaten social cohesion and community networks that people need to survive economically. Men and women have developed alternative methods of navigating the complex reality that they are faced with by creating flexible categories of victim and predator. The seriousness of a crime is assessed depending on both the character of the case and by who the victim and offender are. If they both belong to the local community and the degree of physical violence involved is considered small the case will be handled through. However, if the victim is a child or a young girl or boy this will not be the case as such serious situations will require sanctions and not dialogue. In the worst-case scenarios people will seek redress through the police and statutory judiciary, but often in vain as they simply lack the financial means necessary. In serious cases and when the offender is not one form the local community, the traditional courts will attempt to impose sanctions. Be it fines in terms of manual labour for the victim work or in very grave cases banishment by the offender from the community. This may sound like mild punitive methods, but being sentenced to manual labour can be a hard as this can be run over a long period of time where the person who is sentenced will have little time to grow their own food. Expulsion is also a strict sanction as you will be left alone without right to land to grow food. Such offenders therefore have few other options than to try to establish themselves somewhere else. This is not easy in Liberia and the court which has sentenced the offender, or the local community and the victim's family also can make this even more difficult by letting information about what the offender has done come to the new site the person in question is trying the establish a new life in. The project is now concluded, and our research findings are summarized in reports and an article published in Third World Quarterly, but cooperation will continue. We have a new article coming out during the year in which we complete our findings from Nimba and Grand Bassa with findings of our last study conducted in Monrovia. These findings confirm the main trend above, but show how much more influenced Monrovia is by the international community and this creates greater dissatisfaction with the fact that even if one lives in the nation's capital and many people pass the country's Supreme Court every day this is not a legal system they have access to. It is simply too expensive even here.

The research project is focused on the topic of gender-based violence and the continuation of programs to help victims access justice when international presence and donor support under the umbrella of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000 ) is significantly reduced. The aim is to support knowledge- and capacity-building on legal pluralism in Liberia, i.e. the interplay between the modern legal institutions of law and customary justice, and how they are used. The key challenge GENTRA seek s to address, is the knowledge gap between assumptions about how gender-based violence is best addressed, and how it is addressed in practice. The project will be of an exploratory character, with a view to contribute to our understanding of legal plurali sm in Liberia specifically, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa more broadly. In so doing, we hope to build systematic knowledge on how to best address problems of gender-based violence. It is against this backdrop that the GENTRA project proposes to addres s these crucial challenges, through the following questions: 1) How do the modern court system and the traditional justice institutions address gender-based violence in Liberia? 2) What type of challenges do women face in the different court In order to answer these questions, the project will follow and compare a small number of specific cases and analyze how they have been dealt with in the traditional and modern system. In so doing, it will rely on Liberian researchers and practitioners to underta ke empirical studies based on in-depth interviews with traditional leaders, key national and regional politicians, as well as focus-group sessions with a selection of women who have been involved in the cases. In addition, there will be a series of smalle r targeted surveys to address some crucial topics identified during the comparative case studies in Liberia.

Funding scheme:

NORGLOBAL-Norge - Global partner