“Reform is change. Judicial and legal reform to a great extent involve changing the habits and behaviour of humans, – often contrary to their personal and vested interests. This is not as easy as building roads and bridges, – most people by nature tend both to resist change and to revert to former ways when a short-term pressure for change goes away. Experience shows us that to successfully achieve long-term behavioural change requires a combination of incentives to change, participatory identification and articulation of changes required by those to be most affected by the reforms and sanctions for failure to change. To achieve this we need to create an environment open to change, an important part of which is to inculcate in the judges, support staff and bar an ethos of service and openness to reform …”
The overall theme “Teaching Effective Behavioural Change Programming” has the following subcategories:
- “Delay Reduction” chaired by the Right Honourable Sir Dennis Byron;
- “Human Rights and the Environment” chaired by The Honourable Mr. Justice Madan B. Lokur; and
- “Achieving Just Results through judges’ increased understanding of equality issues in the context of the lives of women, children, visible minorities and sexual orientation (Social Context)” chaired by The Honourable Mr. Justice Peter Jamadar.
All sessions will illustrate teaching techniques to achieve effective behavioural change.
Programme Objectives:
- To inculcate receptivity to change.
- To provide judges with techniques to identify personal bias, arrogance and a path towards intellectual humility.
- To develop programme modules on “Delay Reduction”; “Human Rights and the Environment” and “Achieving Just Results through judges increased understanding of equality issues in the context of the lives of women, children, visible minorities and sexual orientation” ready to be taken away for presentation by national judicial education organizations.
- To exchange information on common problems and solutions in Commonwealth judicial education.
- To gather research in preparation of a report on the status of judicial education in the Commonwealth. When completed, this report will be used as a baseline to chart the progress of Commonwealth national and regional judicial education.
- A meeting of our Board of Directors and heads of Commonwealth judicial education bodies to evaluate work completed over the last two years and chart a work plan for the coming two years.
