The Justice Law and Order Sector is a significant innovation now in operation for 15 years as a holistic Government approach focused on improving the administration of justice, maintenance of law and order as well as the promotion, protection and respect of human rights. JLOS is focused on increasing public confidence and trust in the justice system as well as user satisfaction in the services offered by the sector..

The Justice Law and Order Sector (JLOS) Annual Performance Report for the Financial Year 2013/14, assesses the performance of the sector during the FY 2013/14 across the seventeen institutions that constitute the JLOS annual planning and budgeting framework. Performance was measured at all levels of the results chain from impact to results, outputs, activities and input usage. The performance information in the report was generated from the analysis of the data from sector submissions.

The report is an account of the journey being undertaken by the sector to increase public satisfaction with JLOS services to 70% by 2016; improve public confidence in the justice system to 44% in 2016 and enhancing the index of judicial independence from 3.8 to 4 in 2016 – all in line with the Third Strategic Investment Plan (SIP III). This is the second annual performance report under the Third Sector Strategic Investment Plan (SIP III) adopted in March 2012. The report follows the SIP III structure and tracks performance against targets set out in the JLOS Monitoring and Evaluation Plan.

This performance report covers all activities undertaken and outputs produced by the JLOS agencies using the totality of the JLOS resource envelope. The resource envelope includes the SWAP basket fund, Government of Uganda recurrent and development expenditure as well as other multilateral and bilateral project support that the sector institutions accessed during the FY 2013/14.

Key Milestones

In the year under review, the sector continued to focus on three outcomes of strengthening policy and legal frameworks for effectiveness and efficiency; enhance people’s access to JLOS services and drive the country towards deeper observance of human rights while promoting institutional and individual accountability.

According to the Doing Business Index of 2014, Uganda has improved 7 places from position 129 to 122 partly because of reforms in business registration and reduction in lead times such as the time it takes to conduct a search which is now under 30 minutes and registration of business now takes 16 working hours.

The lead times in issuance of work permits has improved to 8 days and while the lead-time for processing of passports was maintained at 10 days on account of the operationalization of new passport processing centers.

The sector has now achieved 46.8% coverage in terms of districts with a complete chain of front-line JLOS services compared to 34.8% coverage in 2012/13 i.e. a 34.5% growth in infrastructure coverage.

Responding to the need to deepen sector functional presence and ensure that vulnerable people do not traverse long distances to access JLOS services, 35 new service points were opened by various JLOS institutions. As such the number of districts with a functional chain of front-line JLOS service point’s increased by 7% from 79 to 84 which is 75% district coverage compared to 70% at the start of the financial year.

The sector in 2013/14 registered a 10.5% increase in the total number of cases disposed with (124,897 cases disposed compared to116367 cases in 2012/13) at all levels of court which translates into 90% disposal rate of registered cases and 41.4% of the total number of cases in the system.

As a result of this performance, the average length of stay on remand for capital offenders reduced from 11.4 months to 10.5 months while that of non-capital offenders reduced from 3 to 2 months.

Responding to the need to deepen sector functional presence and ensure that vulnerable people do not traverse long distances to access JLOS services, 35 new service points were opened by various JLOS institutions As such the number of districts with a functional chain of front-line JLOS service points increased by 7% from 79 to 84 which is 75% district coverage compared to 70% at the start of the financial year.

The sector registered a 0.5% reduction in the volume of crime and incidence of crime reduced from 305 for every 100,000 persons 2012 to 273 for every 100,000 persons in 2013 according to the Annual Police Crime Report of 2013/14.  This was as a result of strengthened measures to prevent crime, greater reliability of police services with the Uganda Police ranked 95th in the world and 20th in Africa as well as enhanced crime response.

In the area of promotion of human rights, the Uganda Human Rights Commission registered a 65.4% increase in disposal rate of cases with a rate of 45.2% up from 29.6% in previous year.

The sector also registered a 7.6% increase in prisons carrying capacity to 16,094 though the occupancy rate increased by 8.3% to 259% on account of the increase in prison population. In June 2014, the Prison population stood at 41,516 including 55.9% remands prisoners who increased by 8.3% while convicts increased by 7.4%. The “Bucket System” has now been eliminated in 62.7%  of prison units up from 42% in the previous year following  completion of 60 water borne toilets thus improvement of the inmates’ welfare conditions and right to health that brings the coverage to 148 prisons units.

Following the adoption of human rights based approach; complaints of alleged human rights violations against JLOS institutions have started reducing. In the review period complaints against the prisons reduced by 23.6% while those against the police reduced by 0.5%.

The Sector financial reports and statements were audited and returned a clean financial audit report for the SWAp fund. The Justice, Law and Order sector also continued to strengthen complaint handling and disciplinary measures. This is partly manifested by increase in disposal of cases by Judicial Service Commission by 20% over and above the rate of registration posting a case disposal rate of 119.2% amounting to 223 cases.

Justice, Law and Order Sector Services have been recognized by National Development Plan and Uganda Vision 2040 as core and primary factors for economic growth, employment and prosperity. Overall, there is significant potential for the Justice, Law and Order Sector to transform our performance into results that matter to the people of Uganda as we seek to deepen reforms for a pro-people justice system.

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Annual Performance Report (2013 - 2014)