Via Houston attorney Mark Bennett's Defending People blog - which is very much worth a read, incidentally - I've found this piece from IBJ about Anita Mugeni, a criminal defense lawyer in Rwanda.

Mugeni's a remarkable woman, having defended a neighbor who spent three years incarcerated while facing murder charges press by a prosecution system that hadn't done any investigation (even testing the alleged poison on an animal) and that knew the victim wasn't dead to begin with.

But what I found really striking about the article was this:

In June of 2009, Anita cooperated with International Bridges to Justice to train Rwandan lawyers in criminal defense law. Eighty of the three hundred lawyers in the country attended the training and discussed ways to expand the work that Anita and others are doing.Rwanda is a country of over 10 million people. There are 300 lawyers there. The United States is a country of 300 million people - there are 1.1 million lawyers here. That means that 1 in every 265 Americans is a lawyer. In Rwanda, that number is 1 in every 33,953.

(Incidentally, those 300 lawyers represent a 600% increase from the post-genocide period in 1994. An article from last month on IBJ explains that "they are often the first ones to be eliminated when political instability, defiance, and conflict undermine the rule of law.")

And, you know, it's just staggering to think about. Even if you've never hired a lawyer, and never expect that you're going to, in the US, if someone does you wrong, you're at least aware that there's some avenue for redress. But when there's only one lawyer for every thirty-thousand people with a problem, there's really no way to be empowered.

That's not the focus of the article, though - when you've got someone as inspiring as Mugeni to write about, it'd better not be. The focus on the piece is legal aid in Rwanda, which is a pretty fascinating topic on its own.
That's from a "Know Your Rights" poster, like the kind found all over Kigali and rural Rwanda. There's also a radio campaign - vital in countries like Rwanda - on the same subject, and training programs to make sure that all 300 of those lawyers are especially well-versed in criminal defense.

I won't end this with platitudes about how we should be grateful for our own system, flawed though it may be, or exhortions to give money to anyone - it's just useful sometimes to think about the things that we can afford to take for granted.

Labels: anita mugeni, developing world, know your rights, rwanda

posted by Dan   permalink   0 Comments