Maputo — The director of Mozambique's Legal and Judicial Training Centre, (CFJJ), Elisa Samuel, has revealed that it is necessary to train more than 2,500 prosecutors and judges in each career, in order to reach the ideal ratio of one for every 10,000 inhabitants.
Samuel was speaking on Monday in Maputo at the opening of the 2022 Academic Year, and the graduation of candidates for careers in the judiciary and in the Public Prosecutor's Office. The purpose of the CFJJ is to train the country's future judges and prosecutors.
Recent statistics indicate that there are 463 judges and nearly 500 prosecutors in Mozambique, a number which, according to Elisa Samuel, is far below the country's needs.
To reach the ideal ratio, under the current conditions and the capacity installed at the CFJJ, she said, it would take at least 21 years to train the desired number of judges and prosecutors, if the population growth rate were to remain stationary and if an average of 120 people are trained for each of the careers per year.
"These numbers and projections show that there is still a long way to go in the training of cadres for justice in Mozambique to reach the minimum ratios of the region and the world and, consequently, to effectively guarantee access to justice and the law", said Samuel.
In the event, 105 finalists of the 20th course, taught in 2021/2022, were graduated. Initially 114 candidates had been selected from a universe of 570 applications, of whom nine failed.
According to Samuel, of the 105 graduates, 40 will strengthen the Public Prosecutor's Office and 65 will become judges. For the 21st course, which starts this year, 96 candidates have been selected and approved in the public competition to fill 120 vacancies.
There are, she explained, seven unsuccessful candidates from the previous course and another 10 from Angola, as part of a memorandum of understanding, signed in 2001, between the prosecutors' offices of both countries, totaling 113 candidates for this course.
"As we can see, there is a substantial increase in the number of vacancies in the judiciary, which determines the increase in the number of trainees in the initial training courses", she said.
Maintaining this growth, said Elisa Samuel, "is a medium and long-term challenge that falls not only to the CFJJ, but also to the government, the bodies of the administration of justice, civil society, cooperation partners, and others".
