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Trial Monitoring: A Reference Manual for Practitioners
behaviour and interaction (e.g., showing up late, falling asleep or treating only one party in an informal and friendly manner).
Annex II. B contains a list of issues that may help identify problems relating to compliance with
human rights standards. Detailed checklists of specific fair trial rights may be found in ODIHR’s
Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights.112
9.3 Interviews with justice actors and stakeholders
Meeting with actors directly or indirectly involved in the justice system can yield a wealth of information to supplement or verify findings from monitoring hearings or reviewing documents. Interviews may reveal aspects of the system’s workings that are not easily perceived by trial monitoring
alone. This subchapter captures various elements that monitoring programmes should consider
when formulating their working methodology with respect to interviews. The practical advice on
interviews provided below is supplemented by Annex III, which lists various issues that monitoring staff may wish to explore with interviewees and provides two sample questionnaires for interviews to be used or further developed by monitoring programmes. Also, Chapter 12.1 illustrates
the importance mapping the relevant stakeholders, including justice actors, in order to ensure their
buy-in.
Some programmes operate on the basis of a strict or absolute interpretation of the principle of nonintervention.113 For such programmes, the types of interviews described in this chapter are not possible. Alternative approaches for such programmes are to address inquiries through programme
managers to court presidents, or to raise issues in seminars, where multiple judges are invited to
share their general views.
It is common for staff conducting interviews to be required to prepare a note for the file or include
in internal reports the information deriving from interviews. It is also advisable for managers to develop a system for the proper organization of such notes.114 Programme managers and interviewers
will need to consider how to protect any confidential or sensitive information gathered during an
interview. In addition to the duty of confidentiality and the inclusion of confidentiality clauses in
codes of conduct, basic professionalism requires that confidential or sensitive information not be
shared with anyone beyond the persons who need to know, even internally.
Interviewers will need to understand what types of information they can share with interviewees
in a meeting. Monitoring personnel may choose to be general or more specific in the examples that
they bring up, but should always refrain from referring to confidential data, both for professional
reasons and because it could give rise to criminal or disciplinary liability. Supervisors should make
clear to monitors and legal analysts in advance what kinds of data they may or may not share with
interlocutors in discussions. If monitors are in any doubt in a specific instance, they should refrain
from sharing.
9.3.1 Interviews with judges, prosecutors and legal representatives
Interviews with judicial officials115 and legal representatives of defendants or of opposing parties
present a significant means of gaining insight on the strengths and weaknesses in the administration of justice. Their views can shed light on challenges they encounter that may be difficult to
discern otherwise, especially when it comes to determining the root causes of problems identified
112 ODIHR, Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights, op. cit., note 2. A list of other sources for substantive standards is
included in Annex VII.
113 See Chapter 8.1.1, “Duty of non-intervention”.
114 See Chapter 5.3, “Systems to record other types of information”.
115 Namely, court presidents and individual judges, or individual prosecutors and their supervisors.
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