Sierra Leone: Timap
The justice system of Sierra Leone is bifurcated: it is split between the formal national legal system and the local and more traditional customary system. The role of Timap (a product of the Open Society Justice Initiative) is to bridge the gap between these two systems and assist rural Sierra Leoneans in navigating them effectively. The 11-year long civil war that ravaged the country until 2002, left Sierra Leone in a state of economic and socio-structural failure. The rule of violence that existed during this period and the subsequent failure of state institutions to redress past wrongs at the end of the war have eroded what little faith Sierra Leoneans had for national institutions. In addition to these problems, the current distribution of power within communities remains strongly autocratic, with “big men” of questionable integrity unilateral making legal decisions.
It is in this climate of general dysfunction that Timap works to develop primary justice services within rural communities. The program employs thirteen paralegals (having at least completed secondary school education) to manage community issues within five chiefdoms (three in Bo district and two in Tonkolili district). The two founders of the program, Vivek Maru and Simeon Koroma, oversee these thirteen paralegals and provide them with continued dialogic, rather than didactic, guidance and training. Timap’s paralegals act as neutral actors within communities to resolve problems in a manner conducive to future peaceful relations between community members. Through an emphasis on reconciliation rather than punishment, Timap serves both the needs of individual clients and that of the overall community. As such, mediation is the primary tool of the program, but formal litigation is also used in cases where mediation falls short of resolving a conflict.
The purpose of Timap’s methods is to empower communities to, in the future, fairly address conflicts without the presence of a third party. Through its actions, it also provides a healthy degree of competition between the formal legal system and the local customary system, thereby decreasing the individual power of autocrats and fostering positive grass-roots-level change within both systems.