By Alpha Daramy Sesay and Aminata P. Allie

A Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone, Jamesina
King has said that “a vast majority of the country’s population
does not have access to the formal justice system” adding that
women in particular “have to rely on informal or traditional
institutions which often make them vulnerable to exploitation and
discrimination.”

The
Commissioner who was speaking at the formal launch of a manual for
paralegals by the local NGO, Timap for Justice, said the legal system
could help promote poverty if it had laws that discriminated against
the poor and less privileged of society and those laws that ignored
their rights, interests and concerns. She said Timap for Justice had
been at the forefront of providing primary justice at the community
level using the pioneering method of delivering justice services
through community-based paralegals that respond to the peculiar
social and legal context of Sierra Leone. She said Paralegals had
been instrumental in successfully addressing extensive barriers of
justice through mediation, advocacy, education and community
organization.

Sonkita
Conteh, the programme director of a group called Innovations in Legal
Empowerment, described the manual as a “culmination of efforts at
providing grass-roots justice services to the ordinary Sierra
Leonean.” He said the manual was comprehensive to the many
questions that had been asked about paralegals backed up by a guide
on how to set up para-legal programmes which he said should be useful
to organizations that provide justice services.

The
co- founder of Timap for Justice Simeon Koroma said the organization
represented the story of the ordinary Sierra Leonean struggling under
the burden of injustices; the story of a country rising from the
bitter experiences of a civil war with the determination to draw on
the services of traditional dispute resolution, and the story of the
daily intrigues and complexities of the country’s legal system.

The
manual among other things will address key issues ranging from the
role of paralegal and the steps involved in justice problems, the
guiding principles for paralegal staff, paralegal skills,
investigation and fact finding, mediation, advocacy and the role of
paralegals in litigation.

The launch took place at the OSIWA headquarters at Murray Town in
Freetown.

© Politico 11/09/12