Journeys for justice - The Register-Guard

At this point, the relationship between the African nations of Sudan and South Sudan — Sudan split into two last July — more closely resembles a war than merely a divorce. And Eugene resident James Hargreaves has had an unusually close look at both countries in the conflict.

Hargreaves, 69, retired from his position as judge with the Lane County Circuit Court in 1995. Since then, he’s traveled the world as a consultant on court-related affairs, primarily to more than a dozen developing countries from Bosnia-Herzogovina in Eastern Europe, to Guyana in South America, to most of the Asian areas of the former Soviet Union whose names end in “stan.”

“I left the bench at 52 because I got tired of it, tired of solving other people’s problems in a situation where judges had less and less discretion and were more just stepping on the bases,” Hargreaves said.

After four years of consulting for IBM, “A friend told me that the American Bar Association had a Web page with consulting jobs in other countries,” he said.

“My very first assignment was a year in Azerbaijan in 2000 when it was a newly emerging nation, working with courts and judges to strengthen the rule of law in their country.”

Hargreaves doesn’t regret his years as a judge, but his post-retirement career “has been a ton of fun,” even though it has taken him to a few places where personal safety is not a given.

“In a lot of these places, stability can be an issue,” he admitted.

Last summer he spent July in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, the same month as the referendum went into effect.

He returned in April from a three-month stint in South Sudan, just as the friction with its former partner escalated into armed clashes and killings along the border between the two.

“I was in the capital city of Juba, which is in the southernmost part of the country, so I never felt unsafe as long as I was in the city,” Hargreaves said.

Still, one of his first e-mail messages to friends about the trip held a tinge of unease:

“It’s true. I am off again ... I got an e-mail from a friend who has been running a program with the courts in South Sudan. She said she needed a judge for some work and wondered if I knew one. Since I already had the nine shots and pills to go to Sudan, it seemed like something I should grab onto.

“(I fly) for three days to Juba, the capital of the new country of South Sudan. It is going from Khartoum with a population around 2 million sitting in the desert to Juba with a population of about 350,000 in the jungle sitting about 4 degrees off the equator.

“In addition, one does not venture outside of Juba if one has any sense. Between the various rebel forces trying to overthrow the government and tribal conflicts killing between many hundreds and thousands of folks out in the countryside, urban is the name of the game.”

Even so, of all the far-flung places he’s had consulting gigs, his time in South Sudan in some ways was the most rewarding.

“It was hard getting there — it was 10 time zones out and my body felt 180 degrees off — but this was without a doubt the most motivated bunch of judges I’ve ever seen,” Hargreaves said. “There are only 116 judges in the entire country, from the Supreme Court on down. It was a difficult place to be in, but it was really fantastic to work with such smart, eager people.”

Dominated by many

Being a new country, South Sudan had to create a whole new court system, but in a way it was a back-to-the-future exercise, he said.

Almost all of the judges had been educated in the north, what is now Sudan, except for a few schooled in Uganda or Kenya, along with the Supreme Court chief justice, who graduated from Harvard Law School, so most speak Arabic and are accustomed to following the Islamic Sharia law.

“But now, South Sudan uses English as its legal language and common law such as it is practiced in England, so they have to learn a new system,” Hargreaves said. “It all goes back to the British occupation.”

With a history as old as Egypt’s, going back 10,000 years to Neolithic culture, the two parts of Sudan have experienced domination by a wide variety of nationalities and cultures, including Egyptian, Arabian, Turkish and European.

In the 1890s, Belgium, Britain and France all had laid claims to Sudanese territory, but by 1898, Britain and Egypt had solidified a shared control, dividing the country into northern and southern provinces.

Sudan won independence in 1955 but has been beset ever since by a series of civil wars, over governmental structure, Islamic law, disparities of wealth between regions and control of oil revenues.

“When Sudan was partitioned under the British and Egyptians, it was done at the 22nd parallel, and the southern part was under the British colonial system,” Hargreaves said.

“The elite learned English and instituted English-style law, but all that was overrun by the north after independence in the 1950s. Now the south has gone back again, and laws are being written in English, but most judges can’t read it. I found myself teaching law half the day and English half the day.”

Law aside, just being in South Sudan was like nothing Hargreaves had experienced before.

“The entire country has 4,000 miles of road, and only 100 of them are paved — that compares with Oregon, which has 36,000 miles of paved road,” he said.

“In South Sudan, everything from April to October is rainy and a sea of mud, so you can’t go anywhere. Juba has 350,000 people, but it has no sewer system and no water system. There’s a small electrical grid, but it’s often shut down because there’s no oil to run the generator.”

Everything in South Sudan, he wrote in another e-mail message, was difficult:

“Water is pumped from the Nile into big blue trucks and hauled around town where people’s individual tanks are filled. These tanks sit up on tall towers above the roof level of the house so the homeowner can have some water pressure. I haven’t found out for sure if the water is treated or filtered in any fashion. It seems highly unlikely as no one even brushes their teeth in it.

“I don’t know how they got this many cars this far out in the bush but there are some horrendous traffic jams here. There are swarms of motorcycles.

“There are trashed minibuses, some old cars and boda-bodas (sort of a motorized tricycle with a bench seat in the back) that serve as public transportation ... There are no traffic lights or control signs, even though there are some one-way streets. You just have to know.

“The vast majority of the people live in makeshift shacks and shanties. You see quite a number of found, mud-walled huts with thatched roofs that look like someone dropped a Chinese coolie hat over the top.

“There are quite a number of families living on the streets under blanket lean-tos. I am told that many have come to the south from the north with the advent of independence.”

“Great places to be”

His own quarters were a room about 12 feet square with its own small bathroom. The living area held a bed, nightstand desk and chair with a small shelf and a short bar for hanging clothing. Lighting came from one fluorescent bulb on a wall and a small bedside lamp.

Meals were buffet-style, served from a central dining hall in the compound that consisted of a few plywood cabins.

Despite its size, “Juba is really a collection of tiny villages with a few houses, often made from mud with thatched roofs and surrounded by bamboo fences,” he said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The heat — hotter than 110 degrees every day — was almost unbearable. “Even the locals were complaining,” he said.

While South Sudan was his best international working experience because of the eagerness and commitment of the people he encountered, the best place to live was in the Balkans and Moldova, where he worked several times between 2002 and 2010.

Bosnia-Herzogovina and Moldova “were just great places to be,” Hargreaves said. “I would go back to Sarajevo in a heartbeat.”

On the other hand, the lawlessness of Guyana was a not-to-be-repeated location, and Duchanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, “was the pits,” he said.

“It really had no redeeming value — no culture, no food, gross corruption, way off in the weeds — there was just nothing there.”

Most of Hargreaves’ consulting projects have been funded by USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, or its equivalents in other countries.

The South Sudan trip was sponsored by the International Development Law Organization, a 20-year-old organization supported by governments, foundations, businesses and donations.

IDLO provides legal and other assistance to developing nations, especially those, like South Sudan, emerging from years of civil conflict.

With the task of helping its courts develop new procedures, Hargreaves described in an e-mail to friends back home what it was like to watch a mock trial of a criminal case under the current system:

“Boy, was that interesting. In the criminal cases, it appears that the defendant is brought to court on some sort of general complaint that is not really a formal criminal charge.

“The prosecution puts on its case with the defendant cross-examining the witnesses. Then the defendant makes an unsworn statement (usually) denying he did anything wrong ...

“Then the three-judge panel deliberates on the evidence and draws up the formal charge against the defendant if they believe the government has made (enough of) a case for some criminal charge. The charge they draw up reflects whatever the judges think the government has proven. Then the defendant puts on his defense. There is then argument and the panel reaches a verdict.

“Given that the country is shifting (to a British-style) common law, adversarial process, they have a long way to go to get the judges out of the criminal process except for trial.”

Despite the expert guidance he and other consultants provide in shepherding developing countries, Hargreaves is cynical enough to question the lasting effect of their efforts after they leave.

“I’ve been mostly in places where the courts traditionally served the government’s purpose rather than the people’s purpose, so a whole cultural shift has to happen and take root for it to be successful, and there are a lot of barriers — corruption, ignorance, laziness, greed — that can derail it.”

On the other hand, “If we don’t try, it will never happen,” he said.

“And if someone is going to get paid to do a job as fascinating as this, it might as well be me.”

“In a lot of these places, stability can be an issue.”

— James Hargreaves, CONSULTANT