During the period 2002 through to 2004, the University of San Francisco School of Law Centre for Law and Global Justice, in partnership with and under the auspices of The Asia Foundation's Access to Justice Program in East Timor, conducted a Legislative Drafting Initiative comprised of both a civil society module and Parliamentary Committee module.I was the LDI project designer, implementer and manager as well as de facto Project Director although this formal status was denied me by the University in favour of an American lawyer also consulting with USF but who had never been to East Timor, knew nothing of its history or its circumstances at the time and oblivious to the great suffering of the people who had survived a genocide and the cities laying in ruins.
Workshops were conducted with members of civil society organisations to teach the ROCCIPI methodology which is based on the United States-originated Legislative Drafting for Democratic Social Change theory.
The ROCCIPI acronym derives from the 7 basic elements of the theory that are the framework for analysing social problems and proposing draft legislation designed to address those problems; those elements being Rule, Opportunity, Communication, Capacity, Interest, Process and Ideology.
There resulted from the workshops with civil society a number of reports containing the ROCCIPI analysis of several social problems in East Timor and, in some cases, draft legislation.
These reports and drafts were then the subject of further workshops with the relevant Parliamentary Committees whose members were also taught the methodology with the aim of improved legislative drafting process in East Timor.
The reports from the civil society workshops are listed below as links to the content of the English translations of those reports. I also have Portuguese and Indonesian translations so if any one is interested in looking at them, please feel free to Contact Me.
Now president Lu-Olo was the President of the Parliament and I and my team had many meetings with him and educational interaction with the Parliamentary Committees.
At the very first meeting, a sort of hostile xenophobia became apparent as well as ignorance of why we malae were even there in the first place. Fortunately, my Program Manager, who was a well known student dissident to the Indonesian occupation and who had suffered therefore, politely reminded the Parliamentary President Lu-Olo and the Committees that were dominated by Fretilin as the then governing party, that the Parliament had in fact invited the University back to undertake the programme following a demonstrative workshop in the Parliament previously. And, so we were able to proceed.
The CSO component went beyond expectations with the East Timorese students of this arm of the program ever enthusiastic, working hard and together in teams to ponder the social problems they had selected and which had been confirmed with the Parliament and to learn the ROCCIPI methodology which is ultimately directed to the goal of democratic social transformation and the resolution of social problems by study, development of policy and drafting law as well as interaction between civil society and the Parliament.
Our first workshop in the Parliament was with Committee B on Defence and Security. It turned out that the CSO's were concerned about the extent of powers of the Minister and the behaviour of the military in East Timor; which was, indeed, problematical as history has shown us. That had all been put into the CSO report based on the ROCCIPI analysis, translated into Portuguese and Indonesian and distributed to the Committees in preparation for the workshop. It did contain criticism of the role occupants and sought to identify and explain the problematical behaviour of the military.
The first Committee B spokesman began by launching a scathing attack on me and the University and accused us of interfering in the affairs of East Timor. I reassured the Committee that the University had never sought to influence the work of the CSO groups and that the works of the CSO groups were entirely their own, unedited and uncensored by me.
Committee B adjourned. We then resumed and the Committee had the good grace to accept the position I had explained and the objective intention of seriously looking at the reports and learning how they came about through the ROCCIPI workshops with their very own CSOs, their own citizens whom we sought to enlighten on the methods of evaluating and resolving the multitude of grave social problems, the legacy of the Indonesian genocide.
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Serious Crimes and Amnesty in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Communal Rights on Adat Land in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Land Rights in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Prostitution in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Function and Role of F-FDTL in National Defence of East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Livestock Regulation in Urban Areas in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of the Social Problem of Forest Preservation in East Timor
ROCCIPI Analysis of Diplomacy, Defence and National Security
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