Dispute Resolution Practices of Legal Aid Organizations in Developing Countries

This paper gives an overview of the working methods of legal aid services of organizations in Mali, Rwanda, Egypt, Bangladesh and Azerbaijan. The focus is on the practices that are used to assist the parties to solve disputes. These practices are mapped with the use of the five tasks model (Barendrecht 2009) that TISCO developed. The overview reveals a great variety of practices and many similarities both in practices and challenges to facilitators in the dispute resolution processes. The lack of practices to obtain a speedy and effective neutral decision is a serious bottleneck. To further improve services a lot can be gained from mutual learning and the development of sets of evidence based practices. The five tasks model serves as a useful tool to map practices and identify practice based evidence for effectiveness of practices and gaps in approaches that different organisations use.