A number of years ago, when Canada supported a project with China at the University of Ottawa, I was a member of that team. It was the first human rights organization that had ever been recognized by China, by the government, as being something they wanted to listen to. We talked about the importance of the rule of law--it was that basic. Subsequent to that, China adopted the rule of law as part of their administration of justice.
But perhaps more relevant to your question is I've recently been appointed Canadian director of the Vietnam project on judicial strengthening. To my knowledge, this is the largest investment Canada has made so far in this area, $12 million. It's actually $12.5 million, but I think the $500,000 is being contributed by the Vietnamese government.
This project is very interesting, in that Vietnam, being a communist country, has become a member of the WTO as of November and is highly motivated to change their judiciary. In my experience, there's been resistance to this kind of reform of the judiciary for all sorts of reasons, but by and large a lot of judges in our country as well seem to think, or did at one time, that judicial education was not necessary. They knew enough, and once they were appointed judges, that was it.
In most cases, you have this threshold of resistance to get over at first, but in Vietnam it's quite different and it's been driven by the market, which is very interesting. I also believe that not only is judicial education important for respect for human rights and equality and the values that Canadians cherish, but now more than ever, it's seen as integral to successful dealings in the global market.
When I was recently in Vietnam speaking to the senior justice of the Supreme People's Court, they were asking for help, for example, in dealing with international trade agreements because it's not their experience to have to deal with these. They foresee themselves having to resolve disputes and they're not sure how to do it. They're not sure of the principles that will apply. They're not sure about international conventions on human rights, for example, that they have signed on to but have never really had to deal with. Because in communist countries, of course, the judges do the government's bidding; there's no independence of the judiciary.
What we discovered was, for example, there's a position called the procurator in their courts. The judges sit at the bench and the lawyers sit out here and the accused, or whatever the dispute might be, and the procurator sits beside the judge. The procurator's job is to report to the government what the judge has done and what has transpired in the courtroom. That gives you some indication about the independence of the judiciary. Also, these people train right alongside the judges in the judicial academy.
What we're doing there is working very much step-by-step. It's a five-year project and right now it's in the needs assessment phase. I brought our overall work plan, which will have many, many outputs over the five years, everything from examination banks to codes of conduct, to textbooks on substantive issues, to pedagogical techniques and curriculum development for human rights seminars, involvement in civil society, techniques of doing that to assist the judges in developing understanding of ethnic minorities and their values and cultures, etc. So there's a whole range of activities and projects and outcomes that will occur over the next five years.
You see, one of the problems in this field so far is that a lot of judicial education has been very episodic. You go and have a conference for three days in some country in Africa and think when you walk away everything is going to change. It doesn't work that way. It's like educating anyone: you start off with curriculum and you have progress, development, you have evaluations and you have markers you're trying to achieve. So I think we're now into an era of a much more sophisticated approach to these issues.
I think we're seeing that the recipient countries are far more aware of how critically important the judiciary is, not just in the courtroom to dispense justice, but in developing public confidence in democracy. They're seeing the judiciary as an arm of it that must be developed along with governance structures in the mainstream.