Parliamentarians have pointed to injustice committed while trying court cases, urging firm measures to tackle the problem. They made the comments on Tuesday, June 9 during a plenary sitting of the Chamber of Deputies that discussed and approved the Standing Committee on Political Affairs and Gender’s assessment of the 2018/2019 activity report of the Office of the Ombudsman. The Office of the Ombudsman assessed 1,091 cases that people had submitted to it over injustice they claimed was committed in court judgments. The report found injustice in 96 cases, representing 8.8 percent of the total cases evaluated. The Office requested the Supreme Court to retry those cases. It indicates that the Inspectorate of Courts analysed 43 of those cases and realised that 29 or 67.4 percent of them should be retried. The Supreme Court later tried 23 of those cases, and confirmed that there was injustice in 20 or 86.9 percent of them. “96 cases out of 1,091 assessed by the Office of the Ombudsman were submitted to the Supreme Court as they were found to be judged unfairly. That is about 8.8 percent of the evaluated cases. I find it a high number compared to the rebuilding of the justice sector which has been made so far,” MP Emmanuel Bugingo said, expressing the need to better understand the underlying reasons so as to solve the issue. MP Théogène Munyangeyo said that the rate of cases with unfair verdicts is concerning. “When a citizen files a case in court, they seek justice. When 8 percent of those people don’t get justice, it is a concern. Research should be carried out to identify the loopholes [and what causes them] so that we build a quality justice sector,” he said. MP Furaha Emma Rubagumya, the Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Political Affairs and Gender said that cases which are tried in courts but they are found to have been judged unfairly, and cases whose judgments are ineffectively executed, are among prevalent issues that are received by the Office of the Ombudsman. “Those cases are also more recurrent in the reports of the Office of the Ombudsman,” she said. Rubagumya said that the idea to carry out research on cases which have injustice is laudable; pointing out that there should be ways to implement it in line with addressing the problem. Meanwhile, she said that the Minister of Justice explained to the Committee that strategies were adopted to solve the problem, including reinforcing court inspection, peer learning among judges, and referring to other cases tried by superior courts while making decisions on similar cases.
