Photo cc: bloomsberries.

A mock tribunal is not a kangoroo court. The more your mock tribunal adheres to recognized standards of a fair trial, and resembles the existing proceedings in your country, the more credibility the endeavour can earn.

We have explained previously how citizen-based mock tribunals make good use of premonitory power, discussed the impact of repressed testimonies towards making truth and reconciliation possible, and covered 14 things to think about before you organize a mock tribunal.

In this last piece on paralegal forums, we turn to practical advice on conducting non-governmental "trials", with some ideas for follow-up activities that can prolong and widen the tribunal's impact.

Provide briefers. Consider recruiting briefers from the community to lend personal, emotional and practical support to your witnesses. The goal is to make the survivors' testimony an empowering and healing experience, not just a reliving of past horror and suffering. As Glenda Wildschut and Paul Haupt explain in detail in I'll Walk Beside You: Providing emotional support for testifiers at the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, briefers can be chosen from professions that already provide attentive care and close support (social workers, priests and ministers, nurses, counsellors, psychologists, etc.). Because would-be briefers need to be competent in active listening and other forms of individual assistance, this will help locate people with the right skills set and shorten the required training.

Prepare testimonies. Taking the stand to talk about painful memories requires preparation. As most painful experiences are often buried deep to protect one's psyche, powerful testimonies may require some "onion peeling" before they can be expressed starkly. Roleplay the testimonies in advance, preferably with the support of one-on-one briefers.

Organize testimonies around specific violations, the different types of abuse, or the types of "charges" on which you want to provide evidence. Plan the structure to give a story-line to the tribunal, and break down the schedule into specific sittings. Mufuliat Fijabi says in her notebook: "We had grouped the different types of women's human rights abuses into three sessions, each of which lasted more than two hours. The lead facilitators for each of the sessions introduced the issues and the testifiers, and there were short breaks between sessions."

Allocate courtroom roles. Apart from choosing credible judges (covered here), you should also consider appointing a prosecutor. With the help of sympathetic lawyers, you can also appoint a "defence attorney" to bring more balance.

Summon "the accused". Following the principle of fairness, it is best if you can extend an invitation and provide an opportunity to those targeted by your indictment to come and defend themselves. If they refuse, put an empty chair with their name on it. If you are putting a policy on trial, you can put the policy's name on the chair, instead. This will remind everybody in the room of who, or exactly what is under suit.

Hold media workshops. Beyond a press release and a phone call to news editors, how should you prepare the media? Again, from Mufuliat Fijabi: "For the mock tribunal to effectively focus public attention on the issue, it was essential to both attract and prepare the media, and we developed a strategy to achieve this. We held two workshops for journalists, one four days prior to the tribunal, and one the day before.

"The media workshops addressed issues such as:

• the role of the media in eliminating violence against women;
• an assessment of media reports on violence against women;
• the objectives, targets, and expected outcome of the mock tribunal."

"Rather than use only formal lectures, these workshops included brainstorming and discussions, topics of which were raised both by the organizers and the journalists. We chose not to involve actual testifiers in the advance media workshops so as not to pre-empt the tribunal itself."

Follow the legal process as closely as you need to, to meet your goals. Decide which steps you want to replicate from the reading of the charges and opening statements, to testimonies (prosecution, then defence), cross-examination, and final pleas (prosecution, then defence), through to ending with the judges' deliberations, decision and, finally, the sentencing procedure.

Plan follow-up. You should think about follow-up activities on the tribunal. These can serve to further your advocacy work, or to advance legislative efforts. You can plan creative sentencing through major public actions, such as nonviolent raids to conduct citizens' arrests. You can use mock tribunal transcripts in printed or online publications. Videos (or a movie) could be made for further dissemination, or used as part of sensitization and training programmes.

Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org

Other organizing tips? Other follow-up ideas? Please share in the comments below.