A report by the Senatorial Committee on Governance and Political Affairs has revealed that months to the end of their mandate, 25 members of community mediation committees locally known as Abunzi have so far been convicted of corruption related crimes.
The report, presented by the Committee Chairperson Lambert Dushimimana, to the Senate comes after weeks of a countrywide tour, seeking to establish whether mediation committees are functioning and serving the nation as they should.
Mediation committees, commonly known as ‘Abunzi’, are a hybrid of conventional justice system and Rwanda’s traditional conflict resolution mechanism.
They were reintroduced in 2004, mostly motivated in part by the desire to reduce the backlog of civil court cases, as well as to decentralize justice and make it more affordable and accessible for citizens seeking to resolve conflict without the cost of going to court.
They were also seen as major catalysts for cohesion within communities.
A mediation committee is made of seven people and has a mandate of five years, renewable.
Mediation committees have the mandate to solve conflicts regarding both movable and immovable property whose value does not exceed Rwf3 million.
According to statistics, land-related disputes remain the most dominant of all disputes filed to mediators.
Dushimimana told fellow Senators that besides the 25, during their country tour, his team had come across an area where all the mediators had been arrested over corruption, something that he said could lead to other crimes.
"Mediators are bribed to alter their final decisions. In some cases, the parties involved are given copies of the purported final decisions which you find have completely different contents. This can contribute to the loss of trust between locals and the committees,” he said.
The Executive Secretary of the Legal Aid Forum (LAF); Andrews Kananga told The New Times in an interview, that for such issues to be fix, the government needs to provide more incentives to the committees.
"The motivation that they need is not necessarily in terms of money. They need to be coached and offered the training that they require to do their job well but most importantly, they need to be accorded time in terms of how often the Ministry of Justice reaches out to them,” he said.
An assessment of 50,000 people carried out by LAF in 2017 indicates that the 94 percent of the population thinks that mediators as an institution are very important but need more resources to serve better.
Statistics from the Ministry of Justice indicate that 97.8 per cent of the over 48,000 claims taken to community mediators, were solved in the 2018-19 financial year, a slight improvement from the previous year’s 97.3 per cent.
Working on policy document
Last year, the Ministry of Justice launched nationwide consultations to gather views to inform an ongoing effort to devise a robust national policy on dispute resolution.
Views gathered from citizens and civil society organisations will subsequently be integrated in a draft policy document.
Speaking earlier, Anastase Nabahire, the Coordinator of Justice, Reconciliation, Law and Order Sector Strategy (JRLOS) at the ministry, said the new policy will contain the best elements extracted from the various dispute resolution mechanisms that have been used in Rwanda.
Among these include the Gacaca community courts, which tried close to two million cases related to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
"Of the complaints that mediators receive, 95 per cent are resolved while the rest are referred to courts. We are looking for experts who will look at all these mechanisms and come up with a strong policy. Of course, they will also look at best practices from other countries that can be adopted and mainstreamed into the policy,” he said
There are 2,563 mediation committees nationwide. 2,148 of these are based at the Cell level while 416 are on Sector level. In general, there are 17, 941 mediators countrywide.
Of these, 9,988 (55.67 percent) are men while 7,953 (44.33 percent) are women.