I'll Walk Beside You

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:04 -0500

I’ll Walk Beside You

by Glenda Wildschut and Paul Haupt

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In this notebook Glenda Wildschut and Paul Haupt outline the victim accompaniment process for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that developed the concept of "briefers" to install a victim-friendly process. Victims were provided with the opportunity to testify and be supported before, during and after the process. The TRC selected briefers–chosen from the caring professions, such as ministers, social workers and nurses–from the community to provide this support. The briefers acted as volunteers and were trained to perform various tasks with regard to the entire structural process of the TRC. As a consequence of the sustained, supportive work of the briefers during the entire process, victims better understood their legal, emotional and practical position.

Thus, they felt they owned the process and were able to contribute in an important way by making recommendations about reparations. Briefers could be utilized in many settings–e.g. those involving domestic violence or rape, and tribunals court systems–where vulnerable victims need mediation and support to overcome traumatic experiences and especially in processes that involve perpetrators as well.

Between 1995 and 1998, 21,529 people gave statements to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).1 The thousands of hours of hearings were broadcast publicly and became the most watched programming in South African television history. Testifiers recounted the horrors of 34 years of apartheid and repression, bringing to light the contours of a national trauma, and the details of thousands of individuals’ suffering. Testifying publicly about one’s own personal trauma is itself a terribly difficult experience. The TRC committed itself to creating a process that was friendly and accommodating for victims. Part of this process was a program of "briefing" for people coming forth to testify. Thousands of people were accompanied before, during and after their testimony by volunteers trained in psychosocial support as well as in the legal and practical realities of the hearing process. The goal was to provide the necessary support to make the experience of testifying an empowering one that would help in the victim’s longer-term healing process, rather than contribute to renewed suffering.

The briefing process had positive effects on three different levels. On the individual level, it helped the testifiers overcome their apprehensions, avoid secondary trauma, process their painful past and move on with their lives. On a community level, it helped train community members to assist in the psychosocial healing process of the testifiers, while also bringing whole communities together to process and heal from their mutually shared past experiences. And finally, on a national level, the briefing helped the Truth Commission achieve its goal of creating a victim-friendly process that would promote national healing for a traumatised nation. On each of these levels, there are lessons to be learned that may be applicable in other contexts.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Expanding Access to Justice

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:02 -0500

by Marcos Fuchs

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Until a few years ago, there were no legal firms in Brazil that offered free services to people in need. The Pro-Bono Institute has created a new legal tradition in São Paolo, convincing major law firms to donate their legal services and connecting them with NGOs in need of legal services. The Institute has recruited about 140 lawyers and is offering a variety of free services to all kinds of NGOs, including support for important human rights cases. It has achieved a rapid change in attitude in the legal community and pro bono work has become steadily more popular. This workshop demonstrated how to develop pro bono services in the professional legal community to give NGOs and victims of human rights abuse access to more frequent and better legal services.

The expression pro bono publico is Latin for "for the public interest." The expression is now most commonly used to refer to lawyers or other professionals who offer free services to assist people in need or to promote the public interest. By institutionalizing mechanisms to facilitate such public service, the basic human urge to volunteer time to help those in need can become an integral part of the ethic of an entire profession. The pro bono relationship provides a great benefit to both parties: The clients receive services they might not otherwise afford, while the lawyer receives the satisfaction of using his or her skills for a good cause. As a result of this mutual interest, in some countries special institutions have been created to promote free legal assistance for poor people and charitable nonprofit organizations.

Institutionalized pro bono activities are very strong in places like the United States, Australia and Europe, where most of the top law firms have their own pro bono projects providing assistance to the poor, to immigrants and to NGOs. The institutionalization of pro bono services has a direct benefit for human rights. For one thing, human rights NGOs themselves can benefit from such free services. Secondly, the pro bono movement is responding directly to an often-denied human right: the right to a lawyer. Volunteer lawyers are often interested in providing assistance to victims of abuses. In Brazil some of the most respectable NGOs started their activities during the dictatorship (1964-1989) by assisting victims of the repressive government. Many lawyers were providing free legal support to people detained for political reasons.

Unfortunately, there is huge potential being lost. There is a general openness in the legal profession to offering free services to those who need it most. Yet a great many countries with significant and strong legal establishments have no institutionalized process by which people in need can be linked to volunteer lawyers. Despite the Brazilian experience of legal support to victims of repression, until we created the Instituto Pro Bono in 2001 there was no institution with a mandate and capacity to bring together lawyers offering their services with organizations who might need them. More importantly, there was no built-in ethic or professional expectation that lawyers should offer such services. Unlike in the United States, where it is a basic assumption of the legal profession that a firm will offer a certain percentage of its time pro bono, in Brazil and many other countries this is unheard of.

Voluntary service is a purely personal matter, not related to the firm or to the profession as a whole. The Instituto Pro Bono was created to change this reality: to institutionalize the ethic of pro bono service within the Brazilian legal profession and to create an efficient system for bringing together pro bono lawyers with clients in need. In the long run, we believe that this step will increase access to justice for all Brazilians and assist many worthy NGOs. We want to share this experience with you, as we believe the institutionalization of pro bono services is a step that could have a similarly positive effect in many other countries where it is not yet common practice.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Tactical Notebooks, public

I'll Walk Beside You

I’ll Walk Beside You

Expanding Access to Justice