Perception of Impartiality Susceptibility to Pressure Capacity-Building/ Long-Term Commitment • Where monitoring involves post-conflict cases involving war crimes, ethnic violence, or other sectarian issues, less likely to be viewed as unbiased. • More likely to be deterred by access limitations or other pressure not to report critically. • Will most often remain incountry with acquired knowledge and skills; • More likely to continue monitoring for longer periods and/or subsequent projects. • More likely to be viewed as an impartial observer within the goals of the programme. However, bias may still be attributed. • Less likely to be deterred by access issues given no permanent connection to local actors. • Will not be a permanent part of local legal community; • Less likely to engage in monitoring after completion of project or contract term. 4.4.5 Best practices for staffing monitors • The organizer should undertake an estimate of the number of cases and/or hearings that need to be monitored based on programme scope and methodology. For monitoring that intends to make systemic conclusions, the size of the team should be sufficient to foster confidence in the methodology and provide for a representational sampling of courts and cases. For priority case monitoring, an estimate of cases may be obtained by counting the number of such cases currently ongoing from court or prosecutors’ records. • A full-time monitor may be expected to monitor and report on an average of 3-4 hearings a week. Factors affecting this range include: the methodology of monitoring (e.g., hearing observation or hearing observation with file review); the specifics and complexity of reporting requirements; access to cases; and the assignment of other monitoring responsibilities such as gathering secondary information or other weekly reporting. • The benefits of pairings are most pronounced at the early stages of a programme when the monitoring procedure and reporting are new and/or resistance exists in courts to the presence of monitors. As monitoring procedures become standardized and access issues decrease, the break-up of pairings will greatly increase the coverage capacity of a monitoring team. • It should be expected that a number of monitors will be insufficiently skilled or otherwise unlikely to remain on staff. It is therefore useful to slightly overstaff with the expectation that there will be some attrition. • International monitors are best suited to monitor cases when there is a politically charged domestic context that implicates the independence or the impartiality of the entire judicial process. However, the purpose of such monitoring will usually not be to seek judicial or systemic reform as a primary goal but to respond to Trial-Monitoring: A Reference Manual for Practitioners 53