The independence is not only of the judiciary in those countries, but also a question of the work of the prosecutors in the context of those countries.
In the case of the judiciary, one real and serious difficulty has been with the way judges are appointed. They are appointed for a term at the supreme level. They get a five-year appointment. Of course, this means that there gets to be political involvement in the selection processes. There is not supposed to be, and in recent years they have been moving away from this, trying to have vetting processes in some of these countries to say that such involvement will be removed. But these processes become very sensitive, as you can imagine.
What has been happening includes a number of things that I think are positive; for example, the creation of the oral trials approach, which means that trials are now in public, whereas before they never were. That trials are in front of people—the journalists are coming out to the trials to watch them and report on them—is making an enormous difference. That's one thing that's really important, the change of the culture around the oral trial approach is fundamental.
That's one thing. The other thing is that there is an increasing expectation of the importance of this independence. So, when cases come up in which there are perceptions that there may have been some interference, you find a pretty strong community response. One thing these countries have, and there are different levels of it in each country, is very sophisticated civil society organizations that are trying to hold the system accountable. They certainly will speak out and they will certainly challenge, and that's important.
The other thing that's really important is to start creating more systems that allow the judiciary to operate with a real sense that they have some independence. There are numerous aspects to this. Historically, there has been such a change in the judiciary and the whole question of whether there are such things as judicial “career paths”, and all of those sorts of things are really quite recent. You have to imagine that in a country such as Honduras you may be dealing with 10 years of change. Imagine our justice system, if in a 10-year period we decided to change it. In Guatemala, you're dealing with a little bit longer timeframe, but there is rapid change happening in these countries.
The problem is that it's been happening in the context of deteriorating social conditions. This has presented quite a few challenges.