El Salvador judicial reform II project (project no. 519-0376)

Project achievements were notable. To speed case processing, the criminal and civil case backlog was cut in half to 70,000, and a pilot court administration project in all San Salvador criminal trial courts dramatically reduced the percentage of prisoners accounted for by pre-trial detainees. The project also implemented an extensive reform of the Public Defenders Office, resulting, between 1995 and 1997, in a doubling of the number of persons assisted and, with the help of a prison population census, in increasing the number of released prisoners from 4,786 to 7,159. On the legal front, the project helped the Government of El Salvador (GOES) enact numerous legal and administrative reforms to enhance due process, most notably, the Criminal and Criminal Procedures Codes, the Sentencing and Juvenile Delinquency Laws, and the Family Code. To increase public understanding of the law and the legal system, the project sponsored six major popular education or publicity campaigns (most of them conducted by local NGOs) that reached over 100,000 people, as well as numerous activities to disseminate information on sector reforms implemented under the project. With project assistance, the GOES undertook organizational reforms to improve the legal framework of the justice sector and its component institutions. Key achievements included establishing the Justice Sector Coordinating Committee (JSCC) and its technical implementing unit (UTE); establishing a Common Clerk"s Office and a Center for Jurisprudence in the Supreme Court; consolidating the Judicial Training School (JTS) as the principal training entity for all justice sector operators and making it a chief player in the reform process; restructuring the Attorney General"s Office (AGO) and establishing close working relations between it and the national Civil Police in criminal investigations; reorganizing the Office of Legal and Social Assistance (PGR); and making the Ministry of Justice responsible for developing a sound national crime policy and a Crime Policy Unit. Other activities included assisting the JTS in training over 12,000 justice sector operators, and designing and implementing statistics gathering and case tracking systems in the AGO, the PGR, and the court system. As a result of the project, the GOES increased funding for the AGO and the PGR by 170% and 100%, respectively, between 1995 and 1998, and foreign donor assistance to the sector has increased dramatically. Lessons learned were as follows: (1) It was strategically important to make interinstitutional coordination through the UTE and the JSCC a precondition for project execution, not a peripheral activity. (2) Legal and judicial reform should not be done piecemeal. Reform legislation requires implementation through capable institutions, which in turn require good legislation. (3) Include all relevant justice sector institutions in designing reform strategy and ensure that all in need of institutional strengthening receive it. (4) Many local consultants who worked on the project are now in leadership positions and can carry the reform process forward. The project adopted a multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural approach in choosing these consultants and never imposed its ideas on them. (5) Channeling all legal training for justice sector operators through the JTS made the JTS a stronger and more important player in the reform process. By unifying training criteria, all justice sector operators received the same message and helped promote reforms even before they were approved. (6) Legal reform is more the encouragement of cultural change than a technical exercise in drafting legislation. Thus, meaningful, sustainable legal reform took longer than anticipated, especially in the area of criminal justice. Both this project and its predecessor showed that the institutions affected by reforms, as well as the public at large, must support the reform process if it is to succeed. (7) The strategy for promoting judicial reform is very important and needs continual reassessment and readjustment to national realities -- in this case, the need, in light of a crime wave, to shift emphasis from the rights of the accused to the efficiency of the criminal justice system. (8) Observational travel was key in promoting and consolidating reforms. (9) Unlike its predecessor, this project did not make law school reform a priority, but should have. Salvadoran law schools are not producing high quality, reform minded, independent lawyers because they still focus on rote memorization rather than on practical skills and analytical thinking. (10) The project should have designed and implemented a user-friendly statistics gathering system in every justice sector institution at the outset to permit monitoring of reform progress. Also, there should have been more training in how to use the information gathered in planning and in monitoring progress.