First of all, I totally agree with your preliminary statement that all these things are interconnected and very important for overall democratic development. I've focused on the judiciary because that's what I know the most about, but definitely all of those things are important.
I don't know a lot about Haiti, to be honest with you, but I know a little about Afghanistan. I do know that these programs don't work unless there is a desire to have them, number one.
There also have to be some fundamentals in place. It can't be an anarchical situation. There's no point in trying to educate judges if there is no respect for the judiciary, for example, or no respect for law and order or the rule of law. There has to be some basic template to work on.
Having said that, it is very important to see what is going on at the tribal and village level, especially in poor countries. In Vietnam, we're doing that as well. Not only is there a formal justice system, which some people have access to—businesses and wealthier individuals—but in developing countries and emerging democracies, they often have village systems. But these village systems can often be tyrannical and very counterproductive. This was the case in South Africa
In South Africa, they had these institutions called the people's courts out in the townships. Some of them perhaps worked okay, but there were some that were brutal examples of very rough justice. People were flogged and there was very little adherence to any kind of principle or rule. It was an episodic kind of rough justice in which family vengeance, tribal vengeance, and so on, could interfere with what was going on.
So working at that level is very important. Instilling in a basic grassroots system some fundamental rules and principles can be very effective. I mentioned earlier that just outside of Calgary, on the Tsuu T'ina reserve, there is an experiment going on that has been very effective.
Up in the Yukon, Justice Barry Stuart—he's the former Chief Justice of the Yukon Territorial Court and is in fact on the Vietnam project with me—developed a community-based sentencing approach. If someone pleaded guilty to an offence—let's say it was a family violence type of offence or a small robbery—they could be channeled into a community-based system of sentencing, where the community would take a role in dealing with this individual. Certain people would take on the role of, say, taking a person out onto the land to hunt, trap, and bring things back to the village to feed the elders and do things like that, as part of their reconciliation with the community for what they had done.
In other situations, like those of family violence, for example, you might bring in the family members and extended members of the community who are impacted by this type of family violence in the community, so that there can be a healing that takes place. The perpetrator apologizes to the victim and people talk about how they can deal with this problem in a better way, other than to send somebody out of the village to a city to put them in jail for a few years, only to have them come back worse than they were when they left.
These experiments have shown some considerable success in restoring harmony to the community, in restoring relationships, in assisting in developing a justice system that would otherwise be inaccessible. In some situations in remote communities, it's impractical to suggest the presence of a courthouse, with judges and prosecutors and lawyers. It just isn't going to happen. But there are other ways in which principles of fundamental justice and respect for the rule of law can be instilled in communities, with creative grassroots engagement, with responsible members of the communities, elders, or, as they call this person in Tsuu T'ina, a peacemaker who brings people together and organizes these sessions.
It's not separating them from the larger community. In fact, there's a facility to go back into the court system if there's lack of cooperation or if the judge feels this isn't sufficient to deal with the problem. The courts can then take over this particular problem that may be existing in the community.
These alternative solutions are important because they can be done economically and they can be done through strengthening the local resources that are there.