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Despite
the endless negative newspaper articles and cynical financial reports
concerning Latin America today, there is some good news. In the
last few years, a group of law professors, judges, and criminal
law practitioners have conceived and implemented a judicial innovation
research and training program called Proyecto ACCESO. An acronym
for Abogados Creativos Colaborando para Encontrar Soluciones Optimas,
ACCESO has educated more than twelve hundred lawyers, judges, and
government officials from more than a dozen Latin American countries
since 1998. The demand for highly interactive and entertaining rule
of law training is enormous, as many countries around the region
rush to introduce basic restructuring of their respective legal
systems.
Proyecto ACCESO has trained many of the actors and leaders in this
transition process, resulting in hundreds of successful trials using
methods that would have been unrecognizable under their old systems.
The leading country in Latin American judicial innovation is arguably
Chile, thanks to the efforts of Proyecto ACCESO and its partner
institutions in the legal sector. With its pilot steps started in
December 2000, Chile has now rolled out judicial reform in eight
of its twelve regions. A massive expansion is mandated for December
2004, when the reforms are taken to Santiago, the site of more than
eighty percent of the country’s criminal cases. Proyecto ACCESO
is moving its operations from the regions of Chile to Santiago in
2003.
Nowhere does the reform have a better chance to succeed – and
be a model for future reform in the Hemisphere – than in Chile.
Through Proyecto ACCESO, Chilean lawyers and judges have now trained
many Latin American lawyers and judges to become trainers themselves,
as they share their experiences with other Latin American legal
professionals.
In undertaking its mission, Proyecto ACCESO utilizes popular culture
and technology – multimedia, film, performance art, comic books,
and music - to educate the legal sector and the community at large
to promote the rule of law and to provide access points for justice.
We hope you will be join us as a participant in one of the many
programs that Proyecto ACCESO will be facilitating in 2003.
James Cooper
Director, Proyecto ACCESO
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