The Establishment of Fast-Track and User Friendly Courts in Kabwe and Lusaka to Fight Gender-Based Violence Cases Ambitions, development, and practice (Minor Field Study)

Abstract: The study gives a critical description of the establishment and functioning of the fast-track and user-friendly courts to fight gender-based violence cases in Zambia. The two courts were opened as pilot projects in January (Kabwe) and March (Lusaka) 2016 after four years of preparation and study visits by Zambian legal experts in countries around the world. Three areas are in focus: Firstly, the establishment of the courts, including the grounds on which the decision was made and the objectives of the project, including the Swedish involvement; secondly, the functioning of the courts so far, based on observations of court sessions and interviews with the actors; thirdly, an analysis of the state of fulfilment of the intended objectives versus the occurrence of unintended effects of the establishment as well as legal gaps in the project and the ongoing work to fill these. A discrepancy between the results to date of handling gender-based violence cases on the civil and criminal procedure sides is shown. The status quo of the courts observed and described in this study reaches as far as February 2017.