IMPROVE ACCESS TO JUSTICE AND GRIEVANCE MECHANISMS

Improve access to justice and grievance
mechanisms with additional attention to women and children.

Today we have a vast body of international and regional treaties as well as national laws that have recognized a vast majority of rights. For example, the FDRE Constitution has enumerated the basic human rights and freedoms of the peoples of Ethiopia; and has made international conventions part of the local law (Pietro et al, 2014, p.10). However, recognizing or legislating rights cannot be an end by itself and it does not mean that the subjects whom rights are conferred upon are enjoying the rights accorded by these legislations. For the full enjoyment of the rights conferred by the different legislations, a society needs among other things an improved access to justice (Pietro et al, 2014, p.13). The existence of an improved access to justice enables people to bring their cases easily to the justice system and obtain an appropriate remedy (Mwila,2013, p.9).And the task of administration of justice is chiefly done by justice organs like courts. Courts interpret legislations, decide on disputes with decision of some sort and execute their decisions in the act of enforcing the rights of citizens. As a result, we can see that courts should be easily accessible ones in order that citizens can bring their claims relating to infringement of their rights before courts and obtain an appropriate remedy (“Access to Justice – Concept Note,” 53rd Session, p.1).

The justice sector of Ethiopia and improve the access to justice of the Ethiopian citizens among other things that the government of Ethiopia initiated the JSRP (later called the CJSRP).Different projects and targets were formulated under the CJSRP to address the problems associated with the access to justice in Ethiopia including the Federal courts. These include human resource capacity development, court effectiveness enhancement, strengthening JAC, enhancing and strengthening ADR, project for premises and other facilities, improving the transparency and accountability of the justice system, enhancing service accessibility, increasing public participation, enhancing the use of ICT, improving justice sector communication, and ensuring the mainstreaming of cross-cutting issues in the justice sector. And this strategy plan tries to analyze the positive impacts of the CJSRP on the access to justice of the Federal courts in Addis Ababa City Administration. Accordingly, this Strategy plan tries to identify the contributions of the CJSRP in – tackling the problems which prevailed in the Federal courts and improving the access to justice of the Federal courts located in Addis Ababa City Administration. We have mentioned herein above that the Justice Sector Baseline Study identified that the justice sector in Ethiopia including the Federal courts were inaccessible and its services weren’t user friendly. It was also asserted that corruption, much delayed provision of justice, questionable independence of the judiciary, heavy case backlogs, poor case management, poor working environment, staff shortage, very low salary, poor evaluation and promotion system, and inefficient employees characterize the justice sector in Ethiopia including the Federal judiciary (World Bank, 2004, pp. 13 & 61)