Chapter 1 — Trial Monitoring: Purpose and Basic Principles the legal reform process. Programme partnerships and support for domestic monitoring groups increase the capacity of domestic organizations to engage in monitoring. In this way, programmes may facilitate the creation of a local monitoring capacity that will survive beyond the completion of an international organization’s programme. Additionally, monitoring personnel may be subsequently hired by state authorities and be able to use their expertise to benefit the justice system. 1.1.1 Trial monitoring and monitoring of the justice sector Trial monitoring can be defined in a strict or a wider sense. In a strict sense, trial monitoring is limited to observing public court proceedings and concentrating on the conduct of judges, prosecutors, lawyers and, possibly, other judicial officials who are physically present during the trial. Oftentimes, access to public court documents may also be sought. The traditional output of such activity is the issuance of a report, be it public or otherwise. In a number of contexts, this form of monitoring may be the only possible means of assessing the fairness of proceedings and, despite its limited scope, many significant challenges can be detected in this way. However, direct observation of trial proceedings captures only a snapshot of the legal process. In order to understand the root causes of any challenges observed in trial proceedings, to cross-check information gathered from direct observation, and to propose sustainable solutions, there may be a need to seek further sources of information. Gathering such information requires that trial monitoring be defined and implemented in a broader sense, as justice sector or legal system monitoring7. This would comprise observation not only of trials but also of other aspects of the proceedings and other institutions in the legal sphere. These might include prisons, the police, bodies dealing with judicial administration, training institutions, selection processes or disciplinary proceedings for judges and prosecutors, bar associations and their process of admitting, training, and disciplining lawyers, the process of drafting legislation, the effectiveness of civil society in supporting the administration of justice and other matters.8 Obviously, monitoring the justice sector in its entirety is a vast task and would require diverse resources and expertise, as well as special access agreements. There are no easily discerned boundaries between trial monitoring and justice-sector monitoring.9 Generally, OSCE trial-monitoring programmes have endeavoured to strike a balance between strict trial monitoring and broader justice-system monitoring, by covering all areas necessary to achieve their aims while avoiding overstretching their capacities or loosing their focus. Consequently, OSCE trial-monitoring programmes have pursued access to additional sources of information and phases of legal proceedings that are directly relevant to their work.10 Most OSCE programmes in this field now regard trial monitoring as their core activity but use wider justice-system monitoring to supplement their findings. Moreover, many programmes have expanded their activities beyond the 7  Justice-sector and legal-system monitoring can generally be used as synonyms (e.g., the former term is used in the OSCE Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the OSCE Presence in Albania, while the latter is used in the OSCE Mission in Kosovo). 8  For instance, the OSCE Mission to Skopje monitors the State Judicial Council’s open sessions under the same mandate that covers trial monitoring, under the umbrella of independence of the judiciary. 9  Both concepts, moreover, can be seen as a part of human rights monitoring, which covers a broad array of additional issues, such as election observation, monitoring demonstrations and public gatherings, monitoring of asylum proceedings, monitoring implementation of minority rights and gender equality, and all kinds of situations related to the implementation of human rights standards. 10  In practice, this means undertaking a number of activities that transcend the direct observation of the public phase of the trial. Such activities include: a) obtaining access to non-public hearings and to documents that are usually not available to the wider public – i.e., detention orders, statements of defendants and witnesses; b) communication with justice actors about problems they face in their work or their views on legal matters in general; c) monitoring of pre-trial detention hearings and investigation proceedings; d) interviewing detained persons; e) interviewing personnel involved in victim and witness protection and support; f) submitting proposals on draft laws; and g) noting threats to judicial independence and other activities. 17