Bogere Alice Soro, Legal Aid Officer at the Steward Women Organization. (Photo: Awan Moses/Eye Radio).

A legal aid organization is bearing the burden of non-payment of civil servants, often being left with no choice but to facilitate poorly paid investigators to ensure gender-based violence cases are produced before court in time for trial, said an advocate.

Bogere Alice Soro, Legal Aid Officer at STEWARD WOMEN said in situations where GBV cases delay, the organization intervenes by providing transport and food for investigators to expedite court proceedings.

Ms. Soro said investigators have often complained of the salary delays which they said constrain their work.

She further raised concerns about the long waits in administering justice due to backlog of cases – a situation she attributed to fewer number of GBV judges.

“The issues we have always had is the files to be produced before court by investigators,” she said on Eye Radio’s Sundown Show.

“Survivors always face challenges, and we also face challenges because investigators need to be facilitated in the entire process-from the process of investigation, they have to be supported economically.”

“You have to provide transport, feeding – everything for these files to be produced in court. Ideally, they are not paid and this is what we heard from them.”

“So, at some point we have to do that as STEWARDWOMEN because at the end of the day this filed will not be produced before court and there is not justice for the survivors.”

It’s not clear have many people have been convicted of GBV related crimes since the establishment of the the Gender Based Violence and Juvenile Court in Juba in December 2020 until now.

But as of July 2022, the Gender Based Violence and Juvenile Court in Juba had sentenced more than 100 young men to different prison terms for committing sex crimes.

Most of the cases are of defilement and rape.

GBV survivors said in previous media reports, that they had lost trust in the police force, which, according to them did not take sexual abuse allegations seriously.

Civil servants have not been paid for the last one year – in what has been blamed on economic crisis caused by the rapture of an oil pipeline – but which President Kiir once attributed to the mismanagement of non-oil revenue by finance officials.

STEWARDWOMEN is a women-led non-profit non-governmental organization founded in March 2009 and registered with the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission.

The organization was founded to address the problems of violence against women, including sexual and gender based violence, community insecurity and conflicts, and poor governance.

It has over 13 years of experience implementing protection and humanitarian aid response to the community affected by conflict, flood and other disasters in South Sudan.