Access to Justice Beyond the State Courts

Book excerpt: Costliness, excessive delay, bias against the weak, corruption, underfunding, insufficiency of legal skills and shortage of training programmes (for the judicial staff in its diversity), complexity of legal rules and procedures, including the language of both the law and the Court, dependency vis-à-vis the political authorities; these are flaws documented as hindering equal and effective access to Burundi’s formal state court justice system. This book argues that engaging with out-of-court justice in Burundi’s legal pluralism model may positively impact on people’s access to justice, particularly for the poor and the underprivileged.