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Justice Sector Corruption in Ethiopia 229
Recommendation 4: Encourage bar associations to police their own members.
Admittedly, professional associations often afford excessive professional
courtesy to errant members, but given the government’s inattention to
attorney malfeasance, a little redundancy might be a good thing.
Independent bar associations should be encouraged to receive complaints
(which they do not do now) and police their own members instead of
relying only on the ministry and bureaus of justice for this role.
In the best of worlds, the bar associations would also be invited to
evaluate judges and prosecutors, adding their own assessments to
those provided by the principal agencies. Some regional judiciaries
(for example, Amhara) do include bar members in their judicial
administrative councils, but they are conspicuously absent from the
federal body. An external reviewer’s suggestion that citizens be
allowed to sue their attorneys for injurious representation might be
considered, but giving the government an additional role in the process
(beyond that already included in the licensing process) might
invite political harassment.
Recommendation 5: Improve the internal monitoring of the police and prosecution
(and, once developed, public defense).
Whether the government continues with the Singapore (top-down) model
or eventually invites citizens to take a more active role in monitoring corruption,
this step will be critical, not only to control corruption but also to
improve performance overall. The BPR exercise may force this step, as
both agencies will have to fix and track indicators of performance, but
whether or not this happens, the agencies will not improve if they cannot
monitor outputs and link them to individual employees and work units.
Recommendation 6: Admit that corruption is a problem and may become
more so as agencies grow.
It would behoove all agencies to admit that corruption remains a problem,
if not a major one, and to stress that they are giving the fight against
corruption the same emphasis as their other goals. One important step
here might be to conduct an annual survey on user experience with all
agencies, especially regarding corruption. A similar survey was initially
considered for this research, but because of the time limits, could not be
done. A well-crafted survey might focus on general perceptions, negative
experiences with any of the agencies, whether respondents made complaints,
and if so, how they assessed the results. Over time such surveys