E/CN.4/1997/7/Add.3 page 17 in practice. Owing to the daily arbitrary infringements of personal rights by State bodies, the impossibility of defending those rights and the impunity of the perpetrators, legal insecurity is nowadays a fact. (...) In its jurisdictional functions, the State has proved ineffective and inefficient in supervising the lawfulness of official acts, in protecting individuals against arbitrary official decisions, in settling conflicts between persons or between social groups and in making good the damage caused. This failure is due to the precarious independence and general weakness of the Judiciary. As a result of the insufficiency of financial resources made available to the judicial system, to disregard for the Judicial Careers Act and to the impact of party political, bureaucratic, economic or group interests on the administration of justice, this service is unreliable and is perceived as such by the public (...). Legal insecurity clearly affects the lower income strata more severely, so that it is considered that the problem is related to the socio-economic structure of society (...). Personal rights are violated despite the provision of adequate guarantees in the legal system. This unconstitutional or illegal attitude is due to a culture in which the rule of law is not a fundamental value. The rule of law has to be established as a social value, by changing the mechanisms whereby such values are reproduced and by altering the 18 process of personal internalization.” 56. The Minister of Justice, the Attorney-General and the Judicature Council authorities 19 all criticized the shortcomings of the present system of justice, referring extensively to some of these, such as corruption and procedural delays. They expressed great hopes that these and other problems might be alleviated with the reform which is to be introduced with the new Code of Criminal Procedure, to which certain sectors of the judiciary are however opposed. Under this reform, the inquisitorial system should be replaced by an accusatorial system, in which the Public Prosecutor will have sole control of criminal proceedings. The Minister of Justice said that some of the judges in the country were extremely corrupt, but that the Judicature Council did not take any disciplinary measures in that respect. He pointed out that in view of the characteristics of current examination proceedings, which were practically conducted in secrecy, with the magistrates too far removed from the parties and the latter's access to files unduly restricted, corruption occurred all too easily. Furthermore, proceedings were held almost entirely in writing, which added to their excessive duration. Some of the shortcomings could be alleviated by the introduction of an oral phase, as provided for in the draft new code. 57. The Judicature Council authorities said that the judicial system had broken down and that there was a marked shortage of jurisdictional bodies compared with the crime and population indices (a court receives on average between 160 and 200 cases per month). The courts were also experiencing serious shortages in terms of human and technical resources. They said that procedural delays were not due only to the judges, but also to the public prosecutors in the part they played within the legal system, and to the judicial police authorities. They added that any substantial improvement in the administration of justice would depend on introducing a radical structural change and that reform would need to be comprehensive. This required a substantial increase in the budget, which was currently extremely low.