The Africa Justice Note written by my colleages and myself while working with the World Bank’s Africa Justice Capacity Building team has been publishes externally into a book by the World Bank.
It is available online and can be googled.
Thanks!
Being a capacity building specialist and specializing in mediation, I believe that it is imperative to promote and bring about mediation in Maharashtra State. This is not just to say that lawyers, experts and advocates of mediation must go from pillar to post with flyers promoting mediation and taking about it all the time but the idea is to find ways to successfully include mediation into the existing litigation structure. To me that is the key to properly introducing mediation into the system.
Pre-litigation mediation is one way to include mediation into the litigation system. While the Civil Procedure Code has been ammended to include four methods of out of court settlements (alternate dispute resolution methods of arbitration, conciliation, lok adalat and mediation) in relevant cases for litigants in lieu of litigations. Unfortunately s89 is merely suggestive in nature and does not make it compulsary for a potential litigant to try alternate dispute resolution (unlike the Unites States and United Kingdom where it is compulsary) before seeking an audiance with the court.
It is therefore important to concentrate on pre-litigation mediation and arbitration and the idea first is to impress these concepts on clients at their time for great need for relief. Alternate and modern dispute resolution techniques will be accepted faster this way.
The ways and hows will be discussed later blogs.
Later blogs will also discuss the need to include experts in mediations and not just qualified lawyers.
Later blogs will also discuss why it is not necessary to have excess qualifications and years of experience for lawyers to be good mediators.
CSR can often be a single act or many random or specific acts with only a single goal in mind and with a view to finishing the work in a very short span.
This is not the case with empowerment, updgradation and capacity building activities which carry over a span of at least a couple of years to about 15 years. So, it could be many specific acts towards the unliftment of one community or few acts over a period of several years in view to building the capacity and inproving thereof, for e.g existing institutions such as the Courts or local municipal bodies that are formal in nature and whose nature of work revolves around the society it exists in/belongs to.
Some of my main work has been in the field of legal empowerment and capacity building. This is managing, streamlining and guiding long term charitable works to their maximum capacity. This certainly does not mean overseeing only a single specific or one-off acts.
If I am addressing the very wide issue of legal empowerment, then one of my concerns would be whether people have immediate access to fair legal remedies. Where in rural areas, the answer is more often that not, it would imply introducing agents of change to educate people to alternate dispute remedies such as mediation. I actually specialize in capacity building in the realm of mediation. My work involves consulting and advising institutions on creating, preserving and sustaining mediation practises in India.
So, CSR must never be confused with being the same as sociol and legal empowerment.
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