IBJ began planning the Burundi training program in earnest in February of 2008. It was my responsibility to adapt our work in China and Vietnam to this training. I was being assisted by a young Zimbabwean attorney, Marlon Zakeyo. Marlon had worked as an intern for IBJ for two years, during which time he had been building relationships with legal organizations in Africa.

IBJ had already formed a strong partnership in Burundi with a local NGO, APRODH, the Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons. The organization was founded by Mr. Pierre Mbonimpa, known throughout Burundi for his unwavering dedication to the protection of the rights of prisoners in his country. A former prisoner and victim of torture himself, Mr Mbonimpa had fearlessly campaigned against state-sanctioned torture in his strife torn country for over a decade. Despite laws prohibiting torture and other human rights violations, such abuses were still rampant in the country’s overcrowded prisons.

In 2006, IBJ began working together with Pierre Mbonimpa to strengthen Burundi’s criminal justice system. We initiated a rights awareness campaign with the distribution of a poster in Kirundi, the tribal language of the country, illustrating fundamental rights of the accused to be free from torture and to have access to an attorney. The poster campaign was almost too successful. 10,000 posters were printed, but after distributing 7,000 of the posters, APRODH stopped the distribution because they were inundated with many more requests for help than they could handle. It was time to take the next step and build a viable legal system, capable of providing basic legal representation to the thousands of ordinary prisoners waiting for representation and access to a courtroom.

Preparing an in-country training requires understanding of the culture, history and the legal system of a country. I knew the history of the Rwanda genocide, but Burundi’s history had not been as well-documented. A crash course in Burundi history made me realize that this training was going to be much more than just a legal training. IBJ was taking on the much bigger challenge of attempting to work within a legal system virtually collapsed from years of war.

In modern adversarial courtrooms the rules of engagement are clearly defined and chivalrous. But in a post-conflict country the adversarial lines in the courtroom could reflect the history of mistrust and violence. Our main challenge was in designing a training program that would harmoniously bring adversaries in the Burundi criminal justice system together and give them advice on how to reform their system and heal their countries’ open wounds.

To further complicate things, my entire body of experience was within an English speaking, common law system, while the Burundi legal system was a Francophone civil law system. Our final hurdle was working with our small grant from the UN Against Torture that just about covered the travel costs to Geneva, but no more. So the first obvious priority was to find a French-speaking attorney interested in volunteering to work with IBJ.

I knew no French attorneys, had no budget to hire a French trainer, and spoke no French, but saying no to this challenge was not an option. So I forged ahead.