Beyond Access: The Administration of Justice for Women in Uganda explores a core—and often unexplored—question of access to justice through the lens of a single country. The specific research question presented here looks to the Ugandan court system and asks whether women and men are equally able to obtain justice, if at all, once they arrive in court, either in the civil or criminal context. Conversations about the interaction between the justice system and Ugandan citizens, particularly those citizens who are marginalized in one way or another, tend to focus on well-documented obstacles to access, which include, inter alia, prohibitive costs, physical inaccessibility, inadequate court structures, and social stigma. Many interventions designed to ensure sex equality in the justice system focus on improving the substantive laws and training judicial officers to administer justice fairly and equally. The implicit assumption—both in Uganda and elsewhere—is that if the problems of access are overcome, the laws are good and the judges are well-trained and fair, court users can obtain justice. This project takes the important next step of questioning what obstacles court users face once they actually find themselves in the court system.
The research consisted of semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted both in-person and by phone and Skype. Interviewees included magistrates, judges, court users, prisoners, legal services providers, state attorneys and prosecutors, and other government officials with knowledge of the courts and justice system. In all, 86 in-country interviews were conducted in the Northern, Central, and Eastern regions of Uganda. This regional distribution reflects a focus on removing risks of geographical bias.
The research revealed that a number of obstacles prevent both men and women from obtaining justice in courts, although women, due to their socioeconomic position, tend to suffer the weight of such obstacles more heavily than men. Key factors undermining the administration of justice include difficulties executing judgments, language barriers, and corruption throughout the judiciary.
Even when a woman receives a favorable judgment in court, an inability to execute that judgment completely undermines whatever justice she has received. Executing a civil judgment can prove near impossible in certain cases, especially those involving (1) land allocation against family, clan, or community norms, or (2) child maintenance. In the land context, plaintiffs seeking to exercise a right to land in direct opposition to customs are most often female heirs. The options available to these women—securing the assistance of a court bailiff, magistrate, or legal services attorney—are often too expensive, unavailable, or sometimes ineffective regardless. Women also file a large number of child maintenance cases, which raise similar execution problems. Many men are difficult to track down and work in the informal economy, making their wages easy to hide from the law.
The language barrier is another extremely difficult problem to overcome. There are 41 living languages in Uganda, and the language of the courts is English. Within the capital city of Kampala, this presents less of a problem because most people who don’t speak English speak Luganda, for which there are a large number of effective interpreters. Elsewhere in the country, though, this language barrier can and has led to miscommunication between judicial officers and court users, sometimes leading to rulings based on the wrong facts. In its attempt to mitigate the corruption problem in the court, judiciary policy calls for the transfer of magistrates and judges at least once every three years. However, this means judges and magistrates are often assigned to areas where they don’t speak the local language, and where interpreters are inadequate in both colloquial and legal English. Corruption among clerks, who are often tasked to serve as interpreters, sometimes leads to purposeful misinterpretation.
Corruption in the Ugandan judiciary is also a heavily documented phenomenon, and has spurred a number of anti-corruption measures supported by the Ugandan government and international community. However, at least one of those measures—the frequent transfer of judges and magistrates—has other negative effects on the administration of justice. Additionally, corruption is still what all actors engaged with legal system cite first as the key problem preventing the administration of justice. While some courts are cited as treating women worse because they are often poorer and less able to afford bribes, others are considered to engage in a fairer form of corruption. That is, the bribe requested is often calibrated to the amount the person can afford. Regardless, the prevalence of corruption remains a large spoiler of the administration of justice on its own, and also in conjunction with the difficulties in execution and the language barrier.
In addition to the inadequacy of judgment execution, language barriers, and corruption, women also face more case-specific problems, which are elaborated further in the complete report. Ultimately, this research presents a first step towards examining the full extent to which justice is or is not delivered when looking beyond the traditional foci of access, substantive law, and judicial training.