Muramvya is one of seventeen provinces of Burundi, located about 48 km from Bujumbura, the capital city. One of the eleven prisons in Burundi, with a capacity of 100 prisoners, is located within this province in a rural area. A total of 471 prisoners were there as of September 30th, 2012, four times over capacity level. There is one small cell within this prison reserved for children. A prosecution court operates there mainly in criminal or civil matters.
This province has already hosted one IBJ roundtable event and three rights awareness campaigns. The criminal stakeholders of Muramvya have taken part in discussions conducted by the IBJ team around the implications of the principle of innocence presumption in criminal procedure and, thus, have been connected with IBJ lawyers who have begun collaborating with them. From then on, IBJ has assisted with making progressive changes in their criminal justice practices, which explains why positive results of legal assistance targeted at women and children are being observed there.
On July 5th, 2012, IBJ legal fellow Janvier Ncamatwi visited the prison of Muramvya. He identified fifteen women and children needing legal assistance. He then began working on their cases.
Two months later, nine cases (60%) have already been treated by the court. This rapid treatment of cases is not standard of Burundi courts, even for children in conflict with the law. Insufficient personnel explains why it takes so long for courts to assign themselves to cases submitted to them. However, Muramvya court is trying to change this practice. We think that this is the direct outcome of legal assistance and the keenness of IBJ lawyers to change this practice. IBJ applauds the way the court of Muramvya is dealing with the cases of juvenile and women, and wishes this practice would become the guiding rule even for people not assisted by lawyers.
The decisions taken by judges relating to the cases assisted by IBJ lawyer are either acquittals or shortened sentences. Two children and two women have been acquitted. The prosecution had called for life imprisonment for all of them. For the children, one was accused of infanticide and the other was charged with abortion. The two women could have been punished with 5 to 10 years of imprisonment. To the others who had been sentenced, penalties now range between 6 months and three years of imprisonment for children accused of rape or gang robbery and for women accused of infanticide or homicide. Without legal assistance, such cases encounter penalties that could vary between 5 years to life imprisonment. This is one fact that supports why the legal assistance of IBJ to poor people in a country like Burundi is so important, because there is not a formalized legal aid service yet.
Nowadays at Muramvya, the court has five cases to see. Four of them have already been taken to the court and Janvier expects that, by the end of October 2012, all the cases of women and children will have come to a close.