On Friday I met with
Daphne Lariba Nabila, the Director of Programmes at the Legal Resources Centre.
The Legal Resources Centre is an NGO “committed to the realisation of
human dignity by building human rights capacities”. As the name would suggest, a large part of
its work is providing free, or partly free, legal advice and
representation. Any type of case is
accepted: most of the casework concerns family law but disputes over land are
common as well. To qualify for legal
aid, the client must be sufficiently indigent, although there is no set limit –
each case is considered individually.
Even if a client doesn’t qualify for full legal aid, where all legal
services are provided free of charge, they may still be able to get partial
legal aid, where the expertise is free but the client has to pay filing fees
and travelling expenses etc. The LRC
also undertakes mediation, public education campaigns and research projects.
I asked Daphne about the
apparently low level of demand for legal aid that I have commented on before,
and she cited several factors which I had suspected might be accountable. These included the availability of other,
customary ways of resolving disputes; the fact that some people are simply not aware
of legal aid; and the existence of several small(ish) organisations such as the
LRC, FIDA, and CHRAJ. She also informed
me that some private law firms do pro bono work.
I also asked about challenges
faced by the LRC and was interested to learn that, as with the Legal Aid Board,
the problem is not a lack of funding but scarcity of resources. For the LRC, however, it is a paucity of lawyers rather than of space that is the problem: the LRC used to employ ten
lawyers but now has only two. It seems
that there is a significant lack of interest in the profession in working for
legal aid organisations, which is of course less well remunerated than private practice. This suggests that funding is more of an issue than it initially appears.
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| The Legal Resources Centre |
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