LEGAL AID OARD
Ms Fatima Chohan-Khota, MP
Chairperson: Portfolio Committee on Justice and Constitutional Development
Dear Madam
RE: UNDERTAKINGS GIVEN DURING THE BUDGET HEARINGS OF JUNE 2OO4
We thank you for your letter dated 1st September forwarded to our Athlone office. The following is a progress report on the issues raised.
1. Awaiting trial Prisoners Project
We are pleased to report that a Special project has been implemented by the LegaI Aid Board to assist prisoners awaiting trial for longer than a year. A total of 25 of our Justice Centres have been selected to target 31 prisons where over 50% of this category of prisoners is kept. Short term dedicated resources have been procured at each of these Justice Centres to specifically focus on ensuring that these awaiting trial prisoners have legal representation as well as to determine the reasons for the delays in the finalization of their cases with a view to speeding this up. Our Justice Centres are utilizing the statistics kept by Judge Fagan's office and are working closely with the Independent Prison Visitors at each prison. This project is set to run for three months, from September to November 2004.
2. Problems with the introduction of our new integrated computer system resulted in some delays in the payment of our judicare practitioners. However, most of these problems have been sorted out and most practitioners are now paid within 30 days of statement.
A brief modeling of the staff resources of the two organizations was included in our presentation to your committee in June 2004. This showed clearly that the Legal Aid Board was seriously under-capacitated relative to the NPA. One of our programmes presented to you was a request for additional staffing to improve our professional supervisory capability when compared to the NPA. We motivated that this would impact directly on better quality services to clients. We have made a similar presentation to MTEC for additional funding for this. It appears that National Treasury and the Department of Justice will not provide any additional funds to us for this programme. Please clarify what additional modeling is required and for what purpose.
4. Awaiting trial prisoners- children
Statistics on the number of such children is available from Judge Fagan’s office. We are currently utilizing these statistics for our project mention in 1above. This project is also intended to address children who are awaiting trial.
5. Civil Litigation
The Legal Aid Board is obliged to provide assistance to children in legal matters as per Section 26 of the Constitution. Most of the family and divorce matters we deal with pertain to matters involving children. Further, the Nkuzi Judgement obliges the government to provide assistance in land matters where the security of tenure of persons is threatened. A further matter is that our Candidate Attorneys require all round training, including civil matters, before they are admitted as attorneys. This is a prerequisite of their professional bodies the Law Societies. Candidate Attorneys form the major part of our legal professionals and our lack of civil work limits our ability to provide this training for our CAs. Since this could place our continued employment of CAs, and hence more than half our legal programme at risk, we are obliged to undertake civil work. Our involvement in civil matters is about 10% of legal matters handled and there is increasing pressure from stakeholders and clients for civil legal assistance. The Department of Justice has advised that they do not have the capacity to deal with civil matters.
Please advise who these civil matters should be referred to.
Assuring you and your committee of our ongoing commitment to the delivery of quality legal service.
Yours faithfully
Vidhu VedaIankar
Chief Executive Officer