African judges should prioritise case backlog

About 15 chief justices from the eastern and southern parts of Africa are in the country for a week-long conference. The core of the programme is deliberations on matters affecting justice delivery in the subcontinent.

The chief justices have come from the kingdoms of Lesotho and Eswatini, Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Seychelles, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania.

The conference will run under the theme ‘Enhanced access to justice: Underscoring reforms in African judiciaries.

Your lordships, we have a big problem of case backlog in our respective African countries. In Uganda alone, statistics from the Judiciary show that there are about 50,000 cases that are backlogged.

A case becomes backlogged when it has been in the justice system for more than two years without being resolved. This dire situation is not any different from other sister countries.

We implore you to consider alternative dispute resolution mechanisms such as mediation, settling of cases outside court, and plea bargaining, among other alternatives, as opposed to the adversarial method of adjudication of cases.

In the United States, the world’s superpower, the majority of its cases end up being resolved outside the courtroom. We could emulate that.

Since you have a lot of power in the judicial circles of your respective countries, use that power to create policies that encourage alternative dispute resolution. Some of its advantages include less time being taken to resolve a dispute.

In the current adversarial way, it takes an average of four years to determine a case, and less money is involved in hiring lawyers. In Uganda, under the old adversarial hearing of cases, on average a single case takes at least Shs1m and yet under plea bargaining arrangement, it is about Shs300, 000.

Also, in resolving cases under the alternative dispute arrangement, in most scenarios, the warring parties come out when they have mended fences as this leads to a win-win outcome unlike under the normal protracted adversarial hearing where the winner takes it all.

As of September 27, the Ugandan prison population was 77,824, out of which 41,265 were convicts and 36,559 were on remand, which is an overwhelming number since the originally approved holding capacity is 20,036. We could fast-track their trials by opting for alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.

So as you discuss issues affecting Africans in southern and eastern parts of this continent, please root for alternative dispute resolution of cases to effectively tackle the monster of case backlog that has seen many litigants lose faith in our justice systems.