Posted on 06/29/2005 10:12:39 AM PDT by NYer
ST. PAUL, Minn. (CNS) -- Uganda will be a different country because of two Catholic women from opposite sides of the planet who have been working side by side in St. Paul for the past decade.
Ann Bateson of Minnesota and Vastina Rukimirana Nsanze of Uganda have a lot in common besides the faith that sustains them. They are both attorneys in their late 50s who were brought together by an unusual goal: refining law and life in Uganda.
Nsanze, Uganda's commissioner of law revision since 1995, returned to Uganda this June after she and Bateson spent 10 years together compiling the scattered laws of Uganda into one cohesive database.
They first worked together 13 years ago when Bateson, now 59, spent a month in Uganda as a consultant to the government on law reform. Nsanze was executive secretary of the Uganda Law Reform Commission.
"My staff thought I was crazy to go," recalled Bateson, a member of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Roseville, who was Minnesota's deputy reviser of statutes for four years and teaches at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.
Ugandan law had not been codified since 1964. Four attempts since then had failed. The Uganda Gazette, the country's official legal newspaper, printed statutes and regulations when they were enacted, but few copies of the laws were available because of printing costs, and those documents were scattered. No complete set of laws was available anywhere -- not at libraries, universities, government offices or law firms.
"A lawyer could go into court and tell the judge that the penalty for such and such offense is ABCD, when it was not, because that law had been amended, and even the judge didn't have an updated law, so it was difficult to challenge," said Nsanze, 58, who attended St. Luke Parish during her years in St. Paul. She and Bateson were interviewed by The Catholic Spirit, St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocesan newspaper, shortly before her return to Uganda.
"Many injustices occurred as a result of the inability to find an updated law," Nsanze said.
Fines were altered. Jail terms were tweaked. Even well-intentioned Ugandans inadvertently broke the law.
Bateson spent her consulting month in 1992 working with Nsanze to connect the legal dots. The pair turned to The Uganda Gazette, looking up past issues dating back to 1964.
The brief, printed announcements of new laws directed them to pamphlets containing the actual texts. With a laptop computer and one month to work, the women hunted down those pamphlets wherever they could be found.
"We begged, borrowed and bought documents to take back to my hotel room, where Vastina read to me as fast as she could and I keyed as fast as I could," Bateson said.
After 30 intense days, the two attorneys had a complete listing of existing Ugandan laws, which the Supreme Court promptly published in orange-covered handbooks.
But their work had only begun. Amendments had not been added to the list, nor had repealed or obsolete laws been removed.
Codification was still desperately needed, Bateson advised.
Parliament authorized the codification in 1994. In 1995 Ugandan President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni named Nsanze commissioner of law revision and asked Bateson to assist her.
The women agreed that frequent power outages and other problems would make it impossible to do the computer work in Uganda. So Nsanze flew to Minnesota with copies of every legal document, and the two began working six-day weeks, often 12 hours a day.
They categorized every law into a usable arrangement. They had to correct hyphenation, make capitalization consistent, eliminate terms like "hereandbefore" and make the language gender-neutral. The two also had to omit redundant, obsolete or unnecessary laws.
The result of their work is 15,000 pages of legal text, published in 14 volumes of statutes and 14 volumes of regulations.
"The law tells ordinary citizens what their rights are. It tells businesses what the rules of the game are. And it's really important in terms of protecting human rights," Bateson said.
And the codification makes law reform possible, Nsanze said. "You cannot make any meaningful reform if you do not know the status of the law," she said.
Codification will also help the country attract foreign investment, as prospective investors can now have access to needed information such as taxation, licensing and employment regulations, she added.
The codification required major sacrifices, the women said, especially time away from family.
"You do it because you believe in it," Nsanze said.
"We know we did something meaningful in life," Bateson said.
The attorneys said their shared Catholic faith helped them persevere in the 10-year project.
"You wouldn't choose to do a project like this if you didn't have the kind of commitment that your faith gives you to try to make the world a better place," Bateson said.
Consuming as the project was, the women deliberately broke from their work on Saturday afternoons to attend Mass.
"Having a common faith, for Vastina and me, has been a blessing," Bateson said.
"I used to pray, 'God keep us healthy,'" Nsanze said. "I prayed for wisdom, to show us where we need to make corrections and to guide us. I believe that God has been very merciful. It's not just our strength and wisdom. There's been divine support."
Don't let the ACLU/ADL find out about this.
Was it Pope John Paul II that said, "If you want Peace, work for Justice"?
this is why these countries are poor. no rule of law. that needs to be established before we keep pretending that 'democracy' is the key to everything.
beautiful story.
Shouldn't it read "female lawyers"? "Women lawyers" sounds so silly.
Or maybe it should have just read 'Two Lawyers' as it doesn't seem to make a difference that the lawyers in this case were female. Had the lawyers been male, would have the headline read 'Two male lawyers'? With more women than men graduating from law schools these days, female lawyers are hardly so rare to require a headline.
In any case, these two lawyers performed a great service and deserve recognition for there efforts.
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