Implement

I’m really lucky right now to have the opportunity to teach at Parliament. My little class of 5 MPs and 3 Senators is quite a lively bunch. We have a lot of fun and also talk about a lot of serious issues. This past Thursday as we were saying our goodbyes for the weekend, the jokes started flying which unintentionally led us to one of our most serious interactions.

A couple of months ago, I read this really great article by the head of International Justice Mission.. The basic gist of the article is that over the past 60 years the human rights movement has been very successful in getting many great laws in the books in many countries. But the implementation of these laws is another story. Many countries have very corrupt officials, officials who don’t believe in enforcing laws and officials who just don’t have enough money to enforce laws.

The last reason certainly applies to Rwanda. As we were all walking out the door, I was joking with some members of Parliament about what their plans were for the weekend, which clubs they enjoyed attending (almost all the members are over 50 and want nothing more than going home to their wife or husband). As I was listing off names of night clubs, Cadillac, Le Must, Executive Car Wash, KBC, one of the members says ‘oh not KBC they have a big prostitute problem.’

This was relatively shocking to me. I mean everyone knows that KBC is infested with prostitutes but I just guessed these officials were a little out of touch. I was wrong. I slowed the conversation and asked, ‘so you do know?’ They all kind of laughed it off and thought my presumption that they would not know as naïve. Of course my next question was, well if you do know, why don’t you do something about?

Everyone’s answer was most telling. ‘you see Evan, we work really hard to make good laws but doing them is another story. We are a very small poor country with many problems and that’s just another one. You can’t expect us to stand around night clubs and enforce these laws. Prostitution is a big problem in all of Africa (very true) and we do need to do better but it takes time. Our police force is very weak and inexperienced.’

So for those of you interested in human rights, I think this is our task, coming up with creative ways to make sure these good laws that we have worked hard to put in place are enforced. I think this a fairly clear firsthand account that the article by IJM and FRC is correct. Lets hold up the laws we create.