Bibliotheken Online

Judical Reform and Civil Society in Guinea

Insights from the BEFORE Project (2011-2014)

Sibel Gürler ; Joschka Philipps

Buch

englisch

Gürler, Sibel (Verfasser/-in) DNB
Philipps, Joschka (Verfasser/-in) DNB

working paper / Swiss Peace

2

Swisspeace

Bern

2019

47 p.

978-3-906841-13-7

civil society
guinea

Reforming the justice sector entails an engagement with profoundly political issues: how justice is enacted, which moral frameworks count as jurisdiction, and which institutions enforce them. In international policy, these questions appear surprisingly under-debated. Technical challenges of implementation dominate the agenda, and supporters of judicial reform, including donors, policymakers, national governments, NGOs and civil society organizations, rarely problematize the fact that they aim at institutionalizing fairly specific concepts of justice (of Western origins) that may lack local support and ownership. In this Working Paper, we enquire into the practical implications of this discrepancy. We focus on the case of Guinea and the BEFORE project, which was implemented in support of Guinea’s judicial reform process following the 2010 elections. We show that the reform’s state-centered rationale sidelines informal justice institutions and mechanisms, which most Guineans rely on to deal with conflicts. We also highlight that the inclusion of civil society in the reform process did not have the intended effect of giving voice to the broader population, for civil society was too narrowly defined as those organizations subscribing to the policy frameworks of international donors. The resulting lack of local support and the concomitant stagnation of the reform process provide critical evidence for the need to rethink judicial reforms in contexts of legal pluralism.

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