Draft legal aid bill would provide free legal assistance for criminal and civil matters to any Sierra Leonean who has an income of 1 million Leones ($227) or less
DAKAR (TrustLaw) – Enacting a legal aid bill will significantly improve access to justice in Sierra Leone where the majority of people are poor and cannot pay for the services of lawyers, a rights group in the country has said.
Many Sierra Leoneans are exposed to various forms of abuse, ranging from sexual assault on women to corruption by government and security officials, but a lot of these abuses do not reach courts, the Centre for Accountability and the Rule of Law (CARL-SL) said.
Even when they get to courts they are not tried to their logical conclusion because people cannot afford the legal fees, it added.
CARL-SL has been meeting parliamentarians, members of government, lawyers and judges to push for a draft legal aid bill to be voted into law by parliament and implemented in the West African nation.
The draft legal aid bill would provide free legal assistance for criminal and civil matters to any Sierra Leonean who has an income of 1 million Leones ($227) or less and who makes a request for such help to the legal aid board.
“Such a law is long overdue and we cannot wait any longer,” Ibrahim Tommy, executive director of CARL-SL, told TrustLaw.
“At the moment if you are accused of a crime, especially out of Freetown (the capital city), and you are not rich, you have a high chance of ending up in prison because there is nobody to defend you,” Tommy said on the phone from Freetown.
Sierra Leone, among the poorest nations in the world, languishes near the bottom of the United Nations' Human Development Index – compiled using national statistics for life expectancy, education and gross domestic product.
Much of the country's formal economy was destroyed during a decade-long civil war that ended in 2002.
Judicial presence is limited outside the capital, leaving local chieftaincy courts to administer customary law with lay judges.
Many Sierra Leoneans go to these customary courts where they do not need lawyers, and where they don’t have to pay expensive legal fees. But these courts do not, however, have authority over all cases, warned Tommy.
Customary courts cannot preside of matters related to settlement of debts beyond 1 million Leones, and cannot deal with crimes that require prison terms, such as rape. As a result, the majority of poor people involved in such cases that have to go to formal courts abandon the cases, he said.
Cases have been abandoned along the way “because people did not have money to pay for the legal services or their witnesses found it costly to keep coming to court or they just didn’t have lawyers,” Tommy said.
"The legal aid bill provides for paralegals who could advise people in such remote places about how they can access justice," he added
With few established law firms in the country finding it hard to be economically profitable, there is little interest in pro bono work to help improve access to justice.
“Individual lawyers do not provide pro-bono services frequently. It is not common,” Tommy said.
“But once in a while a lawyer may come to court and meet a person who says he doesn’t have a lawyer but has a genuine case and a lawyer decides to help,” he added.
He said free legal services are mainly provided under the aegis of associations and non-governmental organisations that pool resources from international donors and seek lawyers to defend people, especially on issues such as sexual violence against women.
CARL-SL expects that, with sufficient pressure, parliament could debate and pass the legal aid bill between April and May this year.
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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