Newly-named Chief Justice Francis Korkpor, Sr. has outlined home and overseas training opportunities for trial judges and increasing public trust and confidence in the judiciary as high among his list of first priorities. The devout Catholic, who has been an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for nearly ten years, disclosed this to news-gatherers shortly after his preferment by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf this week.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf named Justice Korkpor, 61, to the top judicial post after he had served as acting in the position since last September following the resignation of Chief Justice Johnny Lewis, due to ill health.
Korkpor told reporters, “Since I’ve been around the judiciary for a long time, I feel that I am in a better position to know the problems of the judiciary -- the challenges --- and I have an idea of how to start to tackle these problems so that the image of our judiciary can be at the level that it will be accepted by our people.”
“We need to put in place those things that are necessary in order to restore the public’s confidence in our judiciary,” he said.
A key fueling root cause of Liberia’s 14-year civil war was discontent with the historical role the country’s institutions, including the justice system, played in fostering the social, political, and economic exclusion of the vast majority of the country’s population – the indigenous people.
Though many strides have been made, thus far in the country’s recovery process, there is still a need for long-term reform efforts aimed at strengthening the capacity of the formal legal institutions. However, these efforts still have a limited role in the resolution of the most immediate disputes in this post-conflict context. This is because localized mechanisms of dispute resolution, firmly grounded in customary law, are in fact the primary form of justice preferred by the vast majority of Liberians; because a bewildering array of fees associated with the formal system including: registration fees, gas money for police investigators, requirements that victims pay the cost of food for the detained [or the accused], lawyers’ fees, bribes, and indirect costs such as money for transportation and time spent away from livelihoods.
Therefore, in the public’s eye, the formal system of justice is faulted for its lack of transparency and impartiality, and is widely believed to be a forum in which wealthy, powerful, and socially-connected people can assert their will.
But the incoming Chief Justice has vowed to work toward correcting these vices.
Acknowledging some of these problems, Korkpor blamed unqualified practitioners dispersed across the judicial sector. “We inherited a lot of judicial personnel during the war --- people who are not qualified as judges, people who are not qualified as clerks of court, bailiffs, some of whom found their way into the judiciary.”
He regretted that “warring factions appointed these people without giving due recognition to their backgrounds and qualifications; and we have some of these people in the judiciary today.”
“They say justice delayed is justice denied,” he said. “The best security our citizens should have is the protection coming from the rule of law. You can talk about the police, you talk about the immigration, you talk about the military, but if the people are not satisfied, if they don’t have an avenue where redress can be obtained, we will go back to square one. These are some of the challenges that we see in the judiciary.”
Korkpor was lawyer for Catholic institutions for many years before being named after the civil war, nearly ten years ago, to sit on the Supreme Court Bench.
He said one of the first challenges of his new job is “to make sure of human resource development. The judiciary should be manned by people who are qualified.”
Korkpor described the courts as the “custodians of the Constitution and the statutory laws of the country and as I see it, the judiciary is the strongest pillar of the democracy that we are building steadily in Liberia.”
Seeking to ensure that the court system is guided by international best practices, the incoming Chief said; adding that the Supreme Court, under him, will “set a benchmark for who works within the judiciary.”
Justice Korkpor then praised President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and the Executive for keeping their hands off the work and functions of the judiciary.
Part of his strategy to improve the skills of judges is “a need to partnership with learning institutions in and out of Liberia to have our judges trained even higher --- at master’s degree level in universities abroad.”
“Once we can improve the quality of personnel within the judiciary, most of these problems that we face --- improprieties, ethical transgression, corruption --- will be minimized,” Justice Korkpor said.
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