Legal Technical Cooperation by the ICD-RTI, Ministry of Justice: Outcomes and Challenges

Abstract

In this brief article, the author describes the tasks and activities of the International Cooperation Department of the Research and Training Institute which belongs to the Ministry of Justice of Japan and, further, gives examples of actual activities of legal technical cooperation by comparing Vietnam and Cambodia, the two major recipients of assistance in which the Ministry of Justice of Japan is involved. The Japanese projects for Vietnam and for Cambodia differ in many aspects due to the difference in levels of basic capability of their respective legal community and the difference in concept and approach. While the projects for Vietnam are, in general, comprehensive ones aiming at an overall improvement of its legal system as a whole and, over the years, have themselves developed to a rather complicated cooperation scheme in line with the national strategy for legal system development, the ones for Cambodia are much more narrow-scoped but intensive, focused on the enactment and effective implementation of two big codes, the Civil Code and the Civil Procedure Code. The author hopes that the comparison here will inspire the readers with diverse activities one donor can conduct, based on the actual situation and reality of the recipient country. Lastly in this article, the author expresses some personal opinions as well as concerns on some issues which require broad discussion among stakeholders—the issues of rationale and core values of legal technical cooperation; capacity building of practitioners on the donor side; the need for Japanese legal technical cooperation to be much more “internationalized”.