The Judiciary has kicked off a weeklong Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), a form of traditional justice with a spine ingrained in mediation.
Deputy Chief Justice Richard Buteera says they are rolling out the ADR to reduce case back log and deepen everything justice in the pilot alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
With mediation as focal point, Mr Buteera says the process is already registered success in the land division and court with more reports yet to be received on the progress.
There are more than 161,838 cases in the system awaiting justice with 42,588 registered as backlog that has been in the system for more than 2 years.
This means it will require over 161,000 days to dispose them off and that's if one case is cleared per day which is humanly impossible, but costly time consuming and technical.
And that's how the Judiciary launched a pilot or reboot of the the alternative dispute resolution week which kicked off today
"It's a pilot project," said Buteera, "we shall have reports from the courts and assess. What works and what doesn't. And plan better."
The idea of ADR is not entirely novel. If any, it has been time tested and proven in the NRM era in form of Local Council system.
In the days when LCs were vibrant, police rarely had suspects in their cells and most cases were resolved at the LC level with the community following and acting as arbiters.
The LC court would hear cases and make a ruling and only after one that both parties cannot agree on has failed would the case be taken to the higher authorities.
In Rwanda, the Gacaca courts were popular as a system of transitional justice in Rwanda following the 1994 genocide.
The homegrown approach to justice was used to resolve thousands of cases. But the impact of the system was that community members were reconciled, thus ending bad blood between genocide perpetrators and relatives of their victims or survivors.
The term 'gacaca' can be translated as 'short grass' referring to the public space where elders (abagabo) used to meet to solve local problems.
The impact of the Gacaca was such that those who took part in the killing would be apologise in public and earn the forgiveness of their victims or survivors.
It is the kind of dispute resolution that conventional justice would not meet since once one has served their term in prison, it does not directly mean they have been forgiven yet forgiveness is the height of justice resolution.
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But to polish the gold dust in ADR, the Judiciary would need to train several staff in the area as well as draft and pass a legal framework to guide its operations.
Justice Buteera underscored this much, saying they are currently using the mediation rules of 2013 for benchmark as they draft another document to handle legality of the ADR process.
"We've trained trained credible mediators including retired judges, senior advocates deployed at different courts," he said.
More than six divisions of the high court: Family Protection, Commercial, Land, Civil and Circuit Courts in Masaka and Gulu have been earmarked for the trial process.
More of a restorative process, the ADR is off to a good start with seven out 14 cases in Land Division disposed of while the court of appeal settled 6 out of cases as they await reports from other courts.
