In a bid to fulfill their core mission of efficiently and effectively administering justice, the Judiciary Office in Uganda has made new deployments to improve access to justice for the people countrywide. The new appointees and those transferred have been deployed in different courts across the country. The Judiciary Office believes these new deployments will improve the performance of courts, especially in terms of the determination of cases, specifically at the magistracy level.

According to an official statement from the Judicary, the new deployments have seen the number of Deputy Registrars increase from 29 to 43, Assistant Registrars increase from 8 to 19, and Chief Magistrates increase from 71 to 91. This will reduce the issue of caretaking by chief magistrates. For instance, the chief magistrate of Fort Portal was caretaking for Kasese, Bundibugyo, Ntoroko, Kyenjojo and Kamwenge.

“Those Chief Magistrates wasted more time moving from district to district to read cases. These new developments will allow the Chief Magistrate who has been taking care of circuits, to focus on their dockets.” Sarah Langa Siu said.

Sarah Langa also said that with this human resource boost, a substantial rise in case disposal is expected since all courts will have a resident Chief Magistrate and also have enhanced efforts to eliminate case backlogs.

A two-day training of court staff, including clerks, transcribers, and secretaries, in the electronic court case management information system kicked off today.

“This will increase the rate at which cases are disposed of. I encouraged them to take the training seriously and always practice to master the system.” said Jameson Karemani,  the Judiciary Public Relations Officer, while flagging off the training.

With new deployments and training, Ugandans hopes for easy and quick access to justice are back on track.