B.C. helping boost Ukraine’s legal aid program
Country aims to satisfy justice qualifications to join European Union
Just off the plane from Kyiv, Mark Benton, CEO of B.C.’s Legal Services Society, wanted to talk about Ukraine’s inchoate legal aid system, not the imposition of martial law in the conflict-racked nation.
The military crisis, hopefully, would pass — the civil-society initiatives are about the future.
“This is a revolutionary level amount of change that’s happening, access is changing, the judicial framework is changing,” Benton said enthusiastically.
“What justice systems typically are for is predictability and certainty, and they don’t change like governments. So watching what’s happening in Ukraine is interesting for that reason and partly because it is in aid of a broad policy direction about westernizing the country, becoming better and more affiliated with the European Union. And it’s interesting that they’ve chosen to create a new institution for legal aid there and they have been careful to ensure it’s not corrupt so it becomes a trusted agency for access to justice.”
In the face of ongoing sparring with its Russian neighbour, Ukraine has been rehabilitating its institutions — a Soviet suburb until 1991, the Black Sea nation endured a pro-Russian dictatorship of corruption until 2014 when the so-called revolution of dignity installed a government promising proper civil society.
“They are keeping a justice agenda going forward in the face of what really is an existential crisis for the country,” Benton said. “A lot of change is happening. Partly driven by the justice minister (Pavlo Petrenko), partly driven by a real commitment to having a justice system that works for people. They have grown at a remarkable rate.”
The legal aid system was established in 2013 and now includes a network of 27 regional centres (providing criminal legal aid), 100 local legal aid centres and 434 community-based legal aid bureaus (providing civil and administrative legal aid).
In the country of roughly 45 million, it’s gone from virtually nothing to more than 500 offices or agencies, 1,372 employees, 6,664 lawyers in its registry and more than a million cases completed.
But the journey hasn’t been without speed bumps.
“One of the stories they told me is they hired a new lawyer to come in who had worked for the government previously, who arrived and told the staff in the local office where he was going to be the boss that he was pleased to be there and he looked forward to them assigning 10 per cent of their income to him,” Benton said. “Needless to say, they cleaned him out pretty quickly.”
Ottawa has been supporting Ukraine’s justice initiatives since 2013 by funding consultations and working visits with judges, retired bureaucrats and specialists like Benton, who started making intermittent weeklong trips in 2015.
The country wants to join the European Union and that requires an independent legal system with integrity and a functioning legal-aid plan.
Benton typically arrives in Ukraine on a Monday morning, works through until Friday and flies home. He will meet with stakeholders and talk to senior justice ministry members or maybe leaders of the nongovernment organizations that provide access to justice.
“Like many countries,” he explained, “what they do is guarantee services to certain sectors of the population. Often it will be veterans. In Ukraine, it’s people who have been displaced — basically refugees from that part of Ukraine that’s been invaded.”
Their coverage is broader than B.C.’s, but how deep it goes — what is the extent of the average service available? He isn’t sure.
“My role has been around consulting how the legal aid plan can and should be run and what they should be doing around governance — how do decisions get made, how it reports to government, how it accounts for government funding,” Benton said.
He is amazed at the progress given the ongoing conflict.
Generally, when people have a legal problem they want a resolution process that is timely, inexpensive and relatively easy to use in a system that is authoritative, transparent and fair.
In Canada, we’re great on authoritative, transparent and fair.
“We’re not so good on easy to use, timely and inexpensive,” Benton quipped. “They’re pretty good on timely and inexpensive — easy to use? Maybe not so much. But their problem is more on the corruption side, which means their system is not trusted; it’s not fair; it’s not transparent how things are working. And that’s what they’re working on.
“It’s changing, and it’s changing in interesting ways. One of the things I found that they were doing is they were teaching ‘soft’ skills to lawyers. They are teaching them active listening, empathic responding and solution-oriented problem solving, collaborative frameworks and the kind of things that, as a lawyer, I don’t usually think about as lawyer-type skills.”
Benton was at first skeptical, but he changed his mind a few months ago after attending a meeting of Canadian self-represented litigants.
“Every one of them had complaints about, ‘I’m not being heard,’ ‘people are rude to me,’ ‘the whole thing doesn’t work for me,’ all of which is about their perceptions about how people are responding to them whether it’s desk staff, lawyers on the other side, lawyers who give self-represented litigants advice, judges — the complaints were highly consistent,” Benton said.
Actually training people in the system to improve the ‘soft’ skills and how they treat people was important, he added: “But it’s not anything we do here in Canada at all.”
We could also learn from their commitment to change.
What is happening was equivalent to the radical change wrought in the late 19th century by the Judicature Acts, which over the course of a decade drastically restructured English and Welsh courts, reforming rules and procedures.
“I think it’s critical for us at this stage — since we’ve been remarkably good at talking about the need for change, talking about what the change might be — but we haven’t seen a lot of it in the last five years. This is happening on a much faster time frame (than the judicature transformations).”
Ukraine is also simplifying procedures, which should make them cheaper and faster, he noted.
“We haven’t been very good at that either. It’s not that we don’t know it needs to be done; it’s just some people are actually doing it,” he said.
“What is aligning (in Ukraine) is political leadership, public support for meeting public demands and a broader public initiative or policy initiative about aligning West rather than East and that doesn’t quite make a perfect storm, but ... it’s why change has happened there as quickly as it has. All that stuff is aligning in that country to make a real difference. We’ll see how it turns out. I hope they are not back to learn how to manage with a bunch of cuts.”