Education

A major arena for successful pro-poor rule of law reform has been the provision of secure land rights for the rural poor. The bulk of the 70-75% of the extreme poor on our planet who make their livelihood in the rural sector fall into one of three great groups (altogether around 1.25 billion people) who lack secure land rights: tenants or agricultural labourers on lands of private owners; members of collective farms who have not yet received secure individual land rights in a break-up; and squatters on land claimed under public ownership.

The World Justice Project’s Honorary Chair Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is a Sudanese-born, British mobile communications tycoon, the founder of Celtel, and the chairman of Satya Capital and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

The 67th UN General Assembly recently adopted an unprecedented resolution emanating from its first-ever High-Level Meeting on the Rule of Law in September. For the first time in history, 193 Member States unanimously and explicitly linked the rule of law and development, stating:

The biggest hurdle to any quality grassroots programme is funding. I have met many Cambodians in my capacity as a lawyer, or working with the schools in the education system, who are doing great things in areas such as youth, community development, fair trade and education. These programmes relate to fundamental human rights. I have tried to help them with funding applications, but they have to have strategic plans, budgets and they really have no capacity to do all the work required while trying to run their programmes on virtually nothing.

Saudi women are taking charge in promoting religious, political, social, economic and educational change in their economically, religiously and strategically influential country.  As they become more educated and informed of regional and global developments and trends, many Saudi women are becoming increasingly disenchanted with their social conditions and impatient with their government’s policies against them.

It is difficult to drum up widespread, grassroots political support for the rule of law.  In the eyes of many people, the rule of law does not put food on the table.  Worse still, the law can be a source of oppression.  Governments and law-enforcement officials can and do commit crimes.  The role of law in our Apartheid history is an awful example. Understandably, not all South Africans hold the law in high regard.

‘The root of the problem is that instead of fighting for economic equality, women became satisfied by compliments on the effectiveness and vitality of the juggling act’.  Save the Children recently published its 13th report ranking the state of mothers worldwide. The report uses data from the United Nations and World Health Organization to rank the education, wages and health of women and mothers in different nations. Israel is ranked the 45th best country to raise children, out of 165 countries studied.

The press reports concerning the re-emergence of vigilantism in the form of Cape Flats kangaroo courts, some involving children too, suggest that it is time to consider some of the causes of vigilantism. It is worthwhile to reflect upon the conditions in society which give rise to the levels of frustration, and indeed anger, which permit vigilantism to flourish when ordinary folk take the law into their own hands.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been successful on many levels. They could be understood by all. They could be implemented universally. They have become the development horizon for 140 governments in the South and the coherent cooperation agenda for another 50 governments of the North.

SoFEA stands for Social and Financial Empowerment of Adolescents. The word means ‘Wisdom’ in Persian. The project symbolizes its namesake by enhancing knowledge level of vulnerable adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh on issues that are crucial for them to understand, not just as adolescents, but as individuals partaking in a complex society.

It is a bad week for the rule of law in South Africa when in the space of two days President Zuma and the Judicial Service Commission both reveal that they have scant regard for their respective duties to uphold the rule of law. The president is clearly bound by a Supreme Court of Appeal judgment that requires the National Prosecuting Authority to make a redacted record of what was under consideration by it when it was decided to stop the prosecution of the president on over 700 charges of corruption in 2009.