‘Paralegals have served as a bridge between vulnerable people and the justice system.’
- Deputy President of the Lao Women’s Union, Vientiane Capital
Explaining family law by performing a two person family drama before a captivated audience. Photo credit: Helvetas Lao PDR
Almost exactly nine years ago, Adam Stapleton wrote that ‘the promise of legal aid is an empty one for most people in Africa, thanks to a shortage of lawyers, many of whom are located in capital cities rather than in rural areas. But a new approach that uses paralegals to provide frontline services could make legal aid a real option for people across the continent.’ To illustrate this new approach, the Paralegal Advisory Service Institute (PASI), which started in Malawi and then expanded to several countries across Africa and Asia, came up with the slightly cryptic formula: 1 + 10 = 100. The idea was to amplify the services of the few lawyers who were available by deploying paralegals to (a) do all the legal work for which a lawyer is not necessary and (b) reach out to a larger number of people than any single lawyer ever could. This frees up the lawyers to focus exclusively on tasks that only a lawyer can perform and thus allows them to serve more people. The formula represents one lawyer plus ten paralegals servicing one hundred people, and typically far more than that.
This model has now taken root in Laos, another country in which, for reasons to do with history and politics, is home to exceptionally few practising lawyers. Just as in Malawi, legal practitioners in Laos work almost exclusively in urban centres and mostly in the field of commercial law. Strong and steady economic growth over the last two decades has created an enormous demand for lawyers who can serve the needs of new investors and entrepreneurs.
In 2016, the Association for the Development of Women and Legal Education (ADWLE), with support from the Swiss NGO Helvetas and the EU, launched a project to provide legal aid services to victims of gender-based violence. The available funding was minimal, and the project couldn’t retain lawyers at commercial rates. However, thanks to ADWLE’s reputable standing, it was able to partner with a leading law firm, which offered to support the project with the time of the only lawyer in Laos who specialises in human rights law. While this support was immensely valuable, the part-time services of one or two lawyers were never going to be nearly enough to meet the demand for legal services in the areas that ADWLE had in mind.
They resolved this dilemma by applying the 1 + 10 = 100 formula. Only that in ADWLE’s project, the variables were more like 2 + 60 = 512. With the help of 60 community-based paralegals, the project has thus far provided direct legal services to 512 clients, and in addition to that, it imparted general legal information to 3,517 people.
This model is now breaking new ground by overcoming many of the barriers to accessing justice in rural Laos. Approaching village or district authorities, let alone police stations or courts, can often be intimidating, in particular in sensitive matters such as family violence. To help circumvent this and other hurdles like language and cost, the project engages paralegals. The paralegals are ordinary approachable people in society, who are trained to be available to listen to people’s concerns and grievances in confidence. A paralegal is a volunteer, and the paralegal work is not a full-time job. On average, each paralegal handles only a couple of cases per month. Most paralegals are farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, or employees of companies or local government. Their paralegal role must never become so burdensome that it interferes with their regular job. This is an essential part of the sustainability strategy in the ADWLE project. The paralegals all have their livelihoods secured, so they don’t need much support to continue their paralegal work beyond the project. In Laos, we find the convergence between Buddhist notions of spiritual communality (manifested in precepts like het boun and tamboun) and Socialist ethics of solidarity and collective responsibility. In other words, there is a long-standing culture of volunteerism and working for the public good.
For the concept to be practical, it must be easy to approach a paralegal, anywhere, and at any time – in the break from ploughing the fields, over a cup of tea on the porch, or at the local temple. The paralegal, who has undergone practical training and is familiar with the kinds of difficulties people face, can advise on possible courses of action. When a client brings a case to the authorities or the legal aid clinic, the paralegal, who knows the members of the village and district authorities (getting introduced to these authorities is part of the training) accompanies the client and serves as a support person and sometimes as a translator. In complicated cases, the legal aid clinic will also assign a fully qualified legal representative to support the client. As the Deputy President of the Lao Women’s Union put it, the paralegals thus effectively ‘serve as bridges between people and the justice system.’ The Xaythany District Justice Office noted that the paralegals have been very helpful in facilitating access to the village mediation committee, which in Laos is the first instance formal dispute resolution mechanism. One official explained that ‘before the project, people may have been reluctant to approach these services for fear of biases or prejudice, but with the support of paralegals, people are more confident to present their cases to the village authorities.’
Talking to paralegals in Xaythany District, there were numerous anecdotes of people who felt hesitant about approaching justice institutions with their problems directly, possibly due to concerns about bigotry or not being able to present their issues in a sufficiently eloquent manner. The opportunity to speak with a paralegal about the matter, who can then help bring it to the attention of the authorities, has been instrumental in facilitating access to justice.
Several of the target villages in Xaythany District have a relatively high proportion of residents of Hmong ethnicity. The family traditions and customs of the Hmong differ in many respects from those of the Lao-Tai (known colloquially as Lao Loum or lowland Lao), and the Hmong language is also very different from the majority Lao language used in all formal settings such as courts. The project tackled this obstacle by recruiting paralegals from the within the Hmong community who speak good Lao and can help people who are disinclined to approach the justice system because they feel unable to present their case in fluent Lao.
In less than three years, the uptake of cases by paralegals resulted in six perpetrators of violence against women being convicted of grievous assaults, battery, rape and sexual assaults. A further two alleged perpetrators have been indicted, and trials were ongoing at the end of June 2019. A total of 18 civil cases have also been filed, allowing women to secure divorce settlements and custody arrangements under the civil code. In 47 cases, the project’s legal team made direct representations to village mediation committees to ensure that settlements were compatible with the law and did not fall short of the non-discrimination provisions enshrined in both the constitution and the civil code. However, this is but the tip of an iceberg; most legal problems are solved without recourse to the formal justice system, through informal dispute resolution by village chiefs, monks or respected elders. By having paralegals in the communities who can monitor these unofficial proceedings, the project has helped safeguard the rights of weaker parties also in these less formal mediation forums. If ever a paralegal feels that something might not be quite right in how a dispute is handled, he or she just asks the lawyer at the legal aid clinic who can then weigh in if needed.
While many people have been helped to use the law to ascertain their rights, the project has arguably achieved something beyond allowing women to leave abusive relationships and hold their tormentors accountable. Like in many other rapidly developing countries, the Government in Laos sees a need to establish a legal aid system. But when they look to the legal aid systems in wealthier countries, they find mainly models that rely on lawyers providing representation to individual clients. The costs of such models remain, for the time being, prohibitively high for governments in most developing countries.
As Adam Stapleton noted in his article nine years ago, as long as legal aid is defined only in terms of lawyers representing people in court, legal aid will remain illusory. What PASI demonstrated in Malawi and what ADWLE has now demonstrated in Laos is that with the help of paralegals, legal aid need not be illusory. Not only are these services vital to poor people who need them to settle their disputes and navigate the justice system, but they are also a fundamental building block of the rule of law. The phenomenon of gender-based violence illustrates this well, as it is a veritable litmus test for any justice system. Only when the most vulnerable people in our society are enabled to invoke the law to help put an end to their anguish, only then can we say that the rule of law truly prevails.