In the development nexus of everyday violence and justice system reform: a comparative study of the United Nations and International Justice Mission approaches to law enforcement and judicial capacity building

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to draw attention to the crossroads of everyday violence in developing countries and examine justice reform as a means to address the phenomenons of forced labor, sex trafficking and other forms of everyday violence affecting the vulnerable. It takes a look at the present state of justice system reform efforts through the comparative study done of International Justice Mission and the United Nations in their crime prevention programs. Questions regarding their implementation approaches, efficacies and outcomes are studied in order to assess what is working and what is not in this quest to protect the vulnerable from lawlessness and impunity by the building up of broken justice systems.

The literature review of this research summarizes the findings pertaining the interconnection everyday violence to development, the role of violence prevention as a means to address broken justice systems in developing country context, along with an introduction to a law enforcement based strategy. The methodology adopted of document analysis is used to probe the research questions which looks at both UN and IJM crime prevention initiative documents in order to discern differences in perspective, focus and approach to justice reform in which they are engaged; that of capacity building of law enforcement and judicial systems.

The findings identify an administratively centered strategic approach by the UN in a top down dissemination of international instruments on crime prevention and of UN criminal justice standards and norms while an IJM pioneered model utilizes a grassroots oriented approach of collaborative casework. They work together with the local law enforcement and prosecutors on real cases in an effort to rescue victims from their peril, bring perpetrators to account all while investigating gaps in the justice system that they aim to address as part of their program.

For the UN, strategies to reach measurable results in the ground level is needed, along with evidence of actual crime reduction and perpetrator accountability is yet to be realized in their outcome reporting. IJMs Justice System Transformation model demonstrate that a well thought through approach to training of and collaboration with law enforcement create tangible outcomes as seen in the rescue and restoration of victim’s rights and evidence based capacity building within justice systems. Against this backdrop; measuring impact, program efficacy and duplicability is weighed to discern takeaways and prospects for future improvement and recommendations.