Pascal Paradis is the executive director of the Quebec division of Lawyers Without Borders.  [Photo by Francis Vachon for The Lawyers Weekly] Click here to see full sized version.

Moved by the humanitarian disaster in Haiti, the Canadian legal community is mobilizing to lend a helping hand. Individual lawyers and law firms are organizing fundraisers, immigration lawyers, through the Canadian Bar Association (CBA), are spearheading an initiative to help (pro bono) Canadians and permanent residents seeking to sponsor family members living in the devastated Caribbean country, and the Barreau du Québec is donating $100,000 to help rebuild a justice system in tatters.

Nearly two weeks after the earthquake that has claimed the lives of 150,000 people, according to recent estimates, the focus is still on emergency response, amassing the dead, healing the wounded, finding the missing, feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the homeless. While the earthquake-ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince, is now ostensibly beginning to show increasing signs of stirring back to life, the fear that chaos and violence will reign is palpable, which is why Quebec’s legal circles are now scrambling to set in motion plans to address the judicial void.

“There are security problems, and all the legal infrastructures have been destroyed,” said Pascal Paradis, the executive director of the Quebec division of Lawyers Without Borders, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Belgium whose goal is to provide legal support for people fighting against daily injustices around the world, as it has in Haiti since 2006.

“A lot of people working in the justice system have unfortunately been affected by the earthquake. Some have died, others have disappeared and others are injured. Yet others have lost their files, their offices. We have to think, as of now, of how to help re-establish a system of justice where the rule of law can reign again. We cannot wait two years, a year or even six months. We are now realizing more and more that justice has to be treated as part of the emergency response,” added Paradis, who is trying to keep tabs on what is happening in Haiti through the legal network the organization has fostered over the past four years.

The Quebec chapter of Lawyers Without Borders is now laying the groundwork to implement a “judicial Red Cross” in Haiti. This would be a transitional system of emergency “justice shelters,” operating out of tents, that can be quickly deployed in the country’s desolate communities while giving the nation’s formal system of justice a chance to be rebuilt. Conceived by former Quebec Court of Appeal Justice Louise Otis, in collaboration with Concordia University professor Eric Reiter, the so-called frontline justice system is anchored by trained local jurists who give legal information and advice, and local judges who issue emergency safeguard orders and mediate disputes between parties.

The Barreau has buttressed the initiative, pledging an initial $100,000 — the first time the law society has ever doled out monies to help a nation come to grips with a disaster — while appealing for more support from the province’s legal community. So far, the Barreau has managed to sway the Chambre des huissiers de justice du Québec (the bailiff’s professional corporation), Société québécoise d’information juridique and a number of law firms to donate to Lawyers Without Borders. Quebec has historically strong ties with Haiti, with which it shares a common language and legal system. Indeed, Montreal’s Haitian community of 100,000 people is the largest in Canada.

“This is an exceptional situation, so we had to make an exceptional decision,” said Pierre Chagnon, the Barreau’s elected head. “It was incumbent upon us to seek the funds, and to act as the sparkplug to raise more funds for Lawyers Without Borders. Haiti is now facing social, political, economic and judicial chaos, and we’ve asked Lawyers Without Borders, who have an expertise on justice matters, to come up with solutions under the condition that it is done in collaboration with Haitians and not imposed on Haitians.”

Now in the midst of scrambling to rebuild his network of legal contacts, Paradis intends to soon assess the needs on the ground, in collaboration with the Haitian government, surviving members of the judiciary and legal milieu, the Haitian diaspora in Quebec and elsewhere and other international bodies.

“This project, which is based on the work of Louise Otis and professor Reiter, will have to be developed and adapted to meet the needs of the Haitian people,” said Paradis. “Normally we launch our projects by asking our local partners to identify their needs but in this case it appears we will have to adapt the idea behind the project to the situation at hand.”

Drawn from initiatives around the world, particularly those emanating from the United Nations “Brahimi Report” (which reviewed procedures and goals of U.N. peace operations in the wake of experiences in Kosovo and East Timor), the front-line justice system envisioned by Otis and Reiter is an emergency hybrid justice system that attempts to quickly create an institution to assess and administer the immediate emergency justice needs of the local population by local jurists and magistrates. The centerpiece is the creation of so-called justice shelters, which are centrally located tents that can be put up overnight. Its mandate is broad and includes civil, family and administrative as well as criminal matters. It is not a transitional justice program but rather a step-by-step judicial restorative process that tries to rebuild the justice system, points out Reiter, who added that its work should be done within two years.

“It is quite a simple idea but quite a powerful one,” said Reiter, who has served as Otis’ law clerk. “It is not akin to a foreign mission coming in. The front-line justice shelters try to work with the system that is already in place, trying to leverage the local knowledge and justice system as much as possible. We tried to develop a model that is rapidly deployable, that can be put on the ground right away, because the sooner you provide institutions to meet the justice needs of people, the more chance you have of it taking hold.”

Otis, an international mediation expert who has worked in and out of Haiti for the past six years, said that finding local talent to man the justice shelters may unfortunately prove to be quite a challenge. Montreal’s Haitian diaspora may end up proving to be a vital cog.

“If we are unable to find Haitian judges, we will turn toward the Montreal lawyers who know how to speak Creole,” said Otis, who was a consultant in the development of an interim co-operation framework for justice reform in Haiti and worked on a feasibility study for the implementation of front-line justice in Port-au-Prince as well as remote areas of the country. “But things have to move quickly. If nothing is done, people will lose the notion of justice. It will completely disappear from their mindset.”

Closer to home, members of the CBA’s Citizenship and Immigration Law Section are offering initial legal consultations and to prepare immigration applications — without charge — for Canadians and permanent residents in Canada who wish to sponsor family members affected by the recent earthquake disaster in Haiti. The Barreau, which is collaborating with the CBA, says both organizations intend to meet with government authorities to determine how the federal government intends to respect its promise to fast-track family-class immigration applications from Haiti.

“What was true yesterday in terms of fast-tracking immigration sponsorship applications could be changed by tomorrow,” said Chagnon. “We want to ensure that we have the right answers before meeting with members of the Haitian community who have expressed an interest to sponsor family members.”