23 Oct 2023

Children’s access to justice has always been an uneasy issue to the country’s judicial system, hence efforts are being made to transform and reform the justice system to improve and enhance children’s access to justice.

Ministry of Justice deputy permanent secretary for Judicial and Legal Services, Mr Moffat Lubinda said this at a press briefing on October 20. 

“The objectives of these reforms are to remove bottlenecks and impediments to enable a fair, accessible, affordable and timely justice that will support democratic governance and the rule of law,” he said.

 He said the ministry, through collaboration and partnership with development partners and civil society organizations had concluded two of its policy projects that form part of the reforms and transformation of the justice system.

Such include guidelines on gender mainstreaming within the criminal justice system and child friendly justice system research study to be launched in Thamaga this week. 

He said closing gaps and solving bottleneck problems in the judicial system was core to addressing children’s access to justice.

He said rights of children were core to justice system, adding that every magistrate’s court in the country was a children’s court. Mr Lubinda said such was so to enable children to freely express themselves without any intimidation by court proceedings.

However, he said there was still a lot to do to make court more child friendly, such as ensuring that children did not come across the perpetrators and re-live the ordeal, adding that some interventions such as admitting child recorded interviews in court as evidence required review of the legislation.

Assistant Commissioner of Botswana Police and deputy director of Gender and Child Protection Mr Gaontlafatse Segolodi said statistics showed that children’s cases had been increasing steadily from 2020 to  2023.

For instance, defilement cases increased from 1 825, 2033 and 2059 respectively for the three- year period, child neglect cases increased from 108, 217 and 399 respectively while cruel treatment increased from five to 20 and 80 respectively.

Botswana Police in response created child friendly centres, and the eighth branch would be opened in Maun soon. He said the branches were installed with video recording equipment to record child interviews, which would however need law amendment to be admitted in court proceedings. 

Also, he said officers dealing with child related cases were trained in that regard.

Stepping Stones International human rights advisor, Mr Christian Mahloko said through their partnership with the Ministry of Justice and University of Botswana, with the support of the European Union, they had carried a comprehensive research to investigate the current status of Botswana’s child justice system.

 The research, he said, assessed child friendliness of the system, its strength, gaps, promising practices and recommendation for reform. Among others, the research found that the justice system was not child friendly and the implementation of the Children’s Act was lagging behind. ends