Resource information
Justice interventions in Solomon Islands
over the last decade have focused largely on assisting
Honiarabased state institutions in the form of a variety of
capacity-building programs. This has included a heavy
reliance on expatriate expertise positioned in central
justice agencies. The National Judiciary has benefited
significantly from this support, although to date the direct
effects of increased assistance have not been felt in most
parts of the country. In part this has been because of a
heavy focus on processing the vast amount of criminal cases
emanating from the 1998-2003 period of civil conflict,
locally referred to as the tension. Matters related to the
tension have occupied the time and resources of
Honiara-based justice institutions, particularly the courts.
As tension investigations and trials have subsided there has
been a growing recognition of the limits of the
capacity-building approaches adopted to date (see Cox,
Duituturaga and Scheye 2012). Government, together with
donor partners, has been grappling with future spaces and
modalities of support. Since 2010, the World Bank Justice
for the Poor (J4P) program has supported the Justice
Delivered Locally (JDL) initiative of the Solomon Islands
Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs. The JDL initiative is
aimed at reinvigorating local-level justice services to meet
the demands of the 80 percent of the population living
outside the capital, Honiara.
