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Justice Sector Corruption in Ethiopia 227
citizens’ possibly exaggerated perceptions of its frequency. The following
are some suggested steps in that direction.
Recommendation 1: Improve the mechanisms for receiving complaints.
The complaints-handling and disciplinary offices common to all agencies
are underused and for good reason. They are usually centralized and
inconveniently located (for the federal police, on the seventh floor of the
relatively impenetrable main office; in the courts and Ministry of Justice,
no easier to find). These offices also appear to have few staff—possibly
logically so, given their inactivity, but also creating problems for those
wishing to register complaints.
Thus, a first step—already under consideration by the ethics and anticorruption
commissions—would be to ease access by decentralizing the
reporting centers and making sure their hours of operation (if staffing
does not permit these to be full-time) are well publicized and respected.
None of the offices appears to have good databases, for which reason
none could provide information on complaints regarding corruption as
opposed to all the other complaints they receive. Apparently the cases
are kept in individual files, and the offices rely on the memories of those
in charge to locate them. This weakness could be easily eliminated with,
as discussed below, several advantages. Because, in the case of alleged
judicial corruption, the standard answer of both the agency offices and
the ethics and anticorruption commissions is to recommend an appeal,
it is not clear how much value-added these offices and commissions supply
for complainants. Admittedly, most complainants come with vague
charges, but perhaps a public education campaign would help, focusing
less on why corruption is bad than on what it is and what it takes to prove
its existence. Some of the officials interviewed did report efforts to
explain why certain complaints could not be pursued. This is good practice,
and if any are not following it, they ought to do so.
Recommendation 2: Take a more proactive stance in rooting out corruption.
It would also help—even at the risk of redundancy with the anticorruption
commissions—if the sector agencies took a more proactive stance in
combating corruption instead of waiting for complaints to be filed. The
courts certainly could use their CMS databases to identify irregularities,
even if such irregularities do not prove corruption. Tracking win rates of
lawyers with certain judges, or even tracking the rates of judge-lawyer
assignments, might be a start.