Livingston Armytage has been a Subud member since 1971, and is a child of Subud parents, Sofyan and Halimah. He served as National Chair for Subud Australia between 1981/3, and as a regional and local helper. He has lived and worked with his wife Miyako in about 25 countries mainly in Asia, and is presently leading a judicial development program across the Pacific region. His Ph.D entitled: Reforming Justice: a journey to fairness in Asia, is being published by Cambridge University Press in early 2012…
I originally trained as a lawyer in the early 1970s and practised law for about ten years. I then became increasingly convinced of the importance of promoting justice. So I left my law practice to make training judges and reforming justice systems my vocation. Since then, I have worked to promote justice in many unexpected places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Palestine and Papua New Guinea. While there are rarely Subud groups in such places, I do my best to bring the latihan to keep in touch with that ‘quiet place’ amid all the challenges that I encounter.
All human beings have rights. These rights may be economic, social, political or cultural. People’s lives are, however, all too often blighted by injustices. In many countries, citizens – usually the poor – are routinely denied their fundamental entitlements by the powerful who exploit inefficiencies and subvert justice through corruption and impunity.
I have encountered many examples of injustices as a practitioner reforming the courts. While courts are only one focal point for redressing injustice—and many people in developing societies live in the traditional or customary domain beyond the remit of formal justice systems—they are nonetheless the key mechanism of the state to do so. In Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, the physical safety of colleagues was daily threatened by extremely violent crime which fell beyond the control of the justice system.
Girl on Phnom Pehn rubbish dump. The need to redress injustices affects the rights of people across the spectrum of human life.
In Multan, Pakistan, I met farmers whose grandparents’ dispute remained entangled in the courts for 60 years. In Ramallah, on the West Bank, the court staff were so poorly paid that they openly procured commissions. In Panjshir, Afghanistan, I worked with judges untrained in even the basics of secular law. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, judges knew that confronting the government for stealing land from customary owners had career-terminating consequences. In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, I worked with courts unfamiliar with the notions of enforcement of contract. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, I worked in court-houses which had no electricity or recordkeeping systems. Clearly, justice cannot be administered under these deplorable circumstances.
I have found that injustices continue largely unabated despite increasing quantities of development assistance worth hundreds of millions of dollars to improve what governments like to call ‘the rule of law’. These reform efforts have mainly focused on alleviating poverty. While economic growth, good governance and public safety are worthy goals, global efforts have however seldom directly addressed injustices and more often than not success has been elusive. The best efforts of development practitioners seem to go awry.
As a result, I found myself grappling with the challenges of becoming more effective. The difficulties of this work impelled me to embark on a journey to examine why global endeavours have been so limited in improving the access of ordinary people to justice and how justice systems could be reformed to improve their lives.
Three years ago, I embarked on my PhD to solve the riddle of why reform efforts so often produce anaemic results. How can justice reform be improved? Surely, there must be a better way!
Sheltered from the demands of my daily practice, I was able to engage in critical reflection. In order to deepen my understanding of reform endeavours, I returned to the foundations of philosophical thinking and then out to the edges of the latest empirical research. In doing so, I was humbled by the limits of my own knowledge but enthralled by the extent of existing inquiry. The multi-disciplinary dimensions of development – combining economics, political science, and law and justice – are immensely enriching.
Afghan children in the Jelosi refugee camp.
I became exhilarated by the elegance and persuasion of great thinkers, from Aristotle to Douglass North and Amartyr Sen. Where I had expected to discover clarity, however, I found myself ensnared in a conundrum of uncertainty, divergent disciplinary inquiries, and debates over truth. I challenged these utopian ideas with my experience of ‘the real world’ in places like Haiti and Pakistan to ask: But, does it work? This was at once disconcerting and fascinating. Making sense of these mysteries has characterised my journey of learning.
So, this is what I know: any notion of development without justice is incomplete. Justice is fundamental to human wellbeing and is thereby indivisible from development. Justice has been recognised as core to any civilised notion of the good life since Aristotle: government without justice is tyranny; and society without justice is anathema to its citizens. Any notion of civic wellbeing is unattainable without justice.
But, what is justice – and why is it so important?
From the outset, reform efforts must define what justice is before they can attempt to promote it. While philosophers and political scientists may continually debate the nature of justice and the role of judicial reform, even a four-year-old child will immediately recognise unfair treatment from its parents and know when justice has been denied. For me, justice is the notion of rightness built on law, ethics and values of fairness and equity. Justice protects humanity from Hobbesian notions of anarchy, societal breakdown and the brutishness of life in nature. It embodies an ordered community governed by the rule of law. While there are many renditions of justice, the principles of justice are universal and are reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and constitute the core covenants of the United Nations.
Homeless mother with child inDarjeeling.
All societies comprise some basic structure of institutions that embody renditions of justice, whether formal or informal. These institutions may be political (governance, social affairs and the allocation of interests), economic (opportunities for livelihood), social (civic order and safety) or humanistic (fundamental individual rights).
Additionally, justice may be utilitarian – concerned with maximising social outcomes; egalitarian – concerned with equality of opportunity, individual rights and freedoms; distributive – concerned with allocating interests in wealth, power or privilege; retributive—concerned with punishing wrongdoing; or restorative – concerned with restoring social harmony. Notions of justice are pluralistic and may be variously defined in terms of equality, need, reciprocity or just deserts.
Within this understanding, justice embodies values which societies institutionalise through their laws and courts that administer the laws. Beyond the truism that law may not necessarily be just because political decision-making reflects the interests of the powerful, promoting justice is primarily concerned with enabling rights. These rights are vested across the spectrum of human welfare, that is: political, civil, economic, social and cultural. Hence my work in promoting justice focuses on two levels: first on directly improving the effectiveness of the courts to enable rights allocated in law; and second, more broadly on the political, economic and social dimensions of development.
I believe that the goal of development is to promote civic wellbeing. In order to achieve this goal, judicial reform must promote justice. To bring this into life, justice in development must embody notions of fairness and equity, and enable the exercise of rights and entitlements which are what political scientists describe as the allocation of interests in law. These rights are embodied in law whether at the international, domestic and customary levels. Once this approach is put into effect, it becomes possible for us to focus on and measure the success of reforms in visible improvements in the access to and exercise of these rights by ordinary people.
The critical importance of justice becomes immediately apparent as soon as it is denied. Recognition of the importance of justice is however only now entering the development discourse, as evidenced in the World Development Report 2011 which links justice with employment and security to prevent violent conflict and war. The promotion of justice as fairness and equity requires the inclusion of a human-centred, rights-based approach to improving justice as an end in itself, providing the powerless and poor with the means to exercise their substantive rights.
Such an approach will dynamically increase justice across all aspects of human wellbeing. It enables us to focus on improving aspects of the human condition, specific rights of people which are to be enabled, and how improvements can be measured. In my experience, these improvements in human wellbeing can be enjoyed across the spectrum of civil society.
These rights may belong to Afghanistani girls to education, to Bangladeshi politicians to be held accountable by fair trial, to Nepali dalit women to physical and sexual security, to Vietnamese businessmen to secure investments, to Palestinian labourers and Pakistani taxi drivers to earn a decent living, and to judges to have the capabilities, systems and procedures to enable these rights. These improvements to wellbeing must be measurable in terms of the actual exercise of rights to equality, efficiency, integrity, transparency, accountability, access and legitimacy to improve justice.
Livingston Armytage at Darulaman, Kabul, Afghanistan.
As we all know, it is evident that the real world can be a very messy place, particularly when the interests of rich and powerful people are affected. It is daunting to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction of reform efforts to promote justice. Ultimately we must accept that there are no magic elixirs. Our understanding may always remain limited; and yet we must persevere as best we can as believers, pragmatists, dogmatists, sceptics or seekers in improving the often dystopian conditions of our world.
So, for me, this is our unrelenting challenge: to make a difference by promoting justice; to find order in chaos, reduce complexity to simplicity, and offer practical solutions to the injustices which ordinary people are encountering around the world. I am committed to doing this by using the latihan in my work and research, however modest this contribution may be in redressing these injustices. I am fortunate to have found this path; it is the most extraordinary work that I could have.
Photographs by Livingston Armytage.