• Legal empowerment & access to justice

Legal empowerment & access to justice

This paper presents a review of literature on the current state of local level justice institutions and access to justice in Sierra Leone’s provinces. The review is based on an exploration of legal documents, including laws and statutes, and case summaries where available, historical documents, anthropological texts, current social and political pieces, including newspaper articles, political speeches, and findings from committees of inquiry, and the findings from on-going or recently completed field research projects.

While these sources have helped develop a context for this report, the author says there are several potentials problems associated with reliance on secondary sources. These include,

• lack of information on research methodologies
• bias or agenda of sources,
• reliability over place and time,
• differences in definitions of key concepts

Also, literature related to the civil war is ex-post, and many of the studies cited may rely on small sample sizes or are difficult to generalise.

Thus the author says this literature review is quite rudimentary, reflecting the dearth of recent research on local level justice systems and processes in Sierra Leone. The ideas presented in this report should not be read as conclusive, but rather as hypotheses requiring further study and analysis on many levels.

(Adapted from the author’s abstract)

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