Capacity Building for Nepal's Judicial Committees on Local Dispute Resolution & Community Legal Education Project

Description

Judicial committees are headed by the deputy mayor of the municipality, a majority of whom are female due to gender-specific quotas for government positions. The deputy mayors are often not provided any specific training for this role even though they wield significant power. The judiciary, through the Supreme Court, offers a five-day, in-house training for deputy mayors. However, this training is not mandatory, and only about 10% of all deputy mayors have completed the course. Therefore, a majority are not aware of the specific laws they need to enforce in their jurisdiction. A further challenge is that a number of judicial committee chairs cannot read or write. In practice, this has resulted in committee records of the resolution being preserved only if the deputy mayor hires an outside attorney to write down the decision. Judicial committees are the first line of justice for the majority of the population, however it is a worry trend that because of the challenged stated, the chairs often lack the knowledge and expertise to resolve the cases brought before them. This program aims to address this issue in order to create fair, effective, and transparent service delivery at the local level. As a way to be responsive to citizens’ desire for justice and provide a stable, predictable, professional dispute resolution mechanism, INL aims to implement a program that partners with the Government of Nepal to improve the consistency and quality of the performance of judicial committees.

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