The Tollbooth at the Temple Gates: Why Somaliland’s Legal Aid Bill Must Rise Beyond Paper Promises.
By Advoc. Mohamed Ahmed Abdi Ba'aluul.
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Walk into the open, crowded space leading into the Hargeisa Regional Court and you encounter a picture of justice far removed from the quiet dignity of legal texts. The entrance is a restless human crossroads: police officers moving detainees through the corridors, handcuffed and closely guarded; lawyers hurrying between courtrooms with files pressed beneath their arms; anxious relatives waiting for news; accused persons sitting silently under the watch of officers; clerks in blue shirts moving briskly from office to office with papers and case files; and ordinary citizens standing in bewilderment, trying to understand a system whose language and procedures can seem like a maze. Every corner carries a different story of conflict, accusation, debt, injury, divorce, imprisonment or disputed property. For many of those who enter through those doors, however, the first obstacle is not the law itself. It is the cost of reaching it.
For a poor citizen, justice can sometimes look less like an open public institution and more like a row of tollbooths. A litigant may face court fees calculated as a percentage of the value of a claim, potentially reaching three or four per cent of the disputed amount, alongside various procedural expenses and fragmented charges. For a wealthy litigant, such payments may be an inconvenience. For a struggling trader, a casual labourer, a widow, a displaced family or a low-income household, they can be a wall. Imagine a small trader with a legitimate claim of $3,000. The amount may represent years of savings, the capital of a modest business, or money desperately needed to support a family. Yet before the merits of his case are even heard, he may find himself calculating whether he can afford the journey to the courthouse at all.
This is the uncomfortable reality that any serious discussion of legal aid must confront.
Somaliland therefore needs a Legal Aid Law. But it needs more than a law that sounds progressive, looks impressive in a parliamentary record and gathers dust on a shelf. It needs a law that works in the corridors of police stations, in crowded courtrooms, in detention facilities and in the homes of people who have never before had the confidence or means to approach a lawyer. It needs a law capable of carrying justice across the financial and institutional barriers that currently separate the ordinary citizen from the protection of the law.
The Legal Aid Bill is an important opportunity. But Parliament should resist the temptation to measure success by the mere passage of legislation. A legal aid system is not successful because the statute book contains the words “legal aid.” It succeeds when a poor detainee can actually speak to a lawyer, when an indigent accused person is represented before the court, when a vulnerable litigant can bring or defend a legitimate claim, and when the absence of money does not silently determine who gets justice and who does not.
The centre of such a system must be the beneficiary—not the bureaucracy.
The first question should therefore be simple: Where does a person without money encounter the justice system, and who will be there to help?w
The answer should not be a distant government office buried somewhere inside an administrative hierarchy. It should be the community paralegal who explains the first legal steps; the duty solicitor waiting at a police station; the lawyer standing beside an accused person before the first crucial hearing; the public defender preparing a case; and the legal-aid officer who can guide a poor litigant through an otherwise bewildering process.
These are the people who should form the living machinery of legal aid.
There is a danger, however, that the Bill could create a large administrative structure while leaving the frontline weak. Offices can be established. Directors can be appointed. committees can be formed. Regulations can be drafted. Reports can be produced. Budgets can be consumed. Yet none of this, by itself, puts a lawyer beside a frightened detainee at the moment that lawyer is needed.
A legal aid system should therefore be built from the ground up, not from the roof down. Somaliland does not need a grand bureaucratic monument to legal aid. It needs a functioning bridge between the citizen and the law.
That means putting resources where the legal crisis actually occurs: at police stations, detention centres, courthouses and within communities. The person who has lost his freedom, the family that cannot afford counsel, and the litigant who cannot navigate the legal system should not have to climb through layers of administration before discovering whether someone will help them.
The Bill must also be carefully fitted into Somaliland’s existing legal architecture. Legal aid cannot operate as an isolated island in the middle of the justice system. Its provisions must be harmonised with the Criminal Procedure Code, the Judicial Administration Act and other laws governing police powers, prosecution, courts and legal representation. Where laws overlap, the Bill should make responsibilities clear. Where mandates intersect, the boundaries should be unmistakable. Otherwise, a law designed to open doors could create new corridors of confusion.
This is particularly important in criminal cases, where time is not a minor administrative detail. For a person who has been arrested and deprived of liberty, every hour can matter. The right to legal representation cannot be transformed into a bureaucratic waiting room.
The proposed fifteen-day period for evaluating eligibility deserves especially serious reconsideration. A detainee does not experience detention as an administrative timetable. Fifteen days can be an eternity to someone behind bars, particularly when questioning, statements, bail, remand and other critical procedural decisions may arise long before an eligibility assessment is completed. A constitutional right to counsel cannot meaningfully exist if the person entitled to that right must first wait for an administrative determination of whether he or she is poor enough to receive it.
The solution is not complicated: where immediate legal assistance is necessary, representation should begin provisionally, with financial eligibility being determined alongside or shortly thereafter. The courthouse door should not remain locked while an official searches for the key.
This principle becomes even more important when considering the enforcement of legal-aid rights.
A law that says police officers must inform detainees of their right to counsel is only as strong as the consequences for failing to do so. A law that says lawyers must be allowed access to their clients must answer what happens when that access is obstructed. A law that guarantees representation must explain what happens when a person is interrogated, pressured or required to make statements without the assistance to which the law entitles them.
Rights without remedies are fragile things. They can look impressive in legislation while becoming almost weightless in practice.
The Bill should therefore contain clear reporting, investigation and accountability mechanisms. Where officials deliberately or negligently frustrate a person's legal-aid rights, there should be consequences. Where evidence or statements are obtained in serious breach of protected procedural rights, the law should provide meaningful remedies, including appropriate rules concerning their admissibility. Otherwise, legal aid risks becoming a polite promise made to people who have no power to enforce it.
The same practical seriousness should apply to lawyers themselves.
A legal-aid lawyer cannot provide effective representation if access to the client is repeatedly delayed, confidential consultations are obstructed, case files are withheld, or court appearances are treated as a favour rather than a professional right. The lawyer must be able to meet the client, review the evidence, prepare the defence and speak freely with the person represented. Legal aid is not simply about assigning a lawyer's name to a case. It is about giving that lawyer the practical conditions necessary to do the job.
The Bill should therefore recognise that representation is a service, not a ceremonial appointment.
Nor should legal aid be confined narrowly to the moment when a person enters a courtroom. Many legal problems begin long before litigation. A community member may need advice before signing an agreement. A family may need assistance before a dispute becomes a criminal complaint. A detainee may need counsel before giving a statement. A poor litigant may need help understanding whether a claim is legally viable before spending scarce money pursuing it.
This is why community-based legal assistance and paralegal services matter. They can become the first bridge across the gap between ordinary people and a legal system that often appears distant, technical and intimidating.
But the Bill must also be financially realistic. Legal aid cannot be created by legislation alone. Lawyers must be paid. Paralegals must be trained. Duty schemes must be staffed. Offices require resources. Transportation, communication, case management and supervision all cost money. If the state creates an entitlement without providing a credible mechanism for financing it, the promise will eventually collide with reality.
That collision is precisely what Parliament should prevent.
The legislators therefore face a choice that is larger than the wording of individual clauses. They can create a legal-aid system that looks orderly on paper but struggles at the point of delivery, or they can design a lean, practical and enforceable system that begins with the person standing outside the courtroom wondering whether justice is something he can actually afford.
The distinction matters.
Somaliland has passed many laws before. The challenge is not always the absence of legal language; it is the distance between legal language and everyday reality. A right written beautifully in a statute can still be useless to a person who cannot pay the filing fee, cannot find a lawyer, cannot reach a duty solicitor, cannot meet counsel in confidence, or cannot obtain assistance before an irreversible procedural step has taken place.
Legal aid should close that distance.
That is why Parliament should pause before passing the Legal Aid Bill in its present form. **There is little value in replacing one locked door with another, or in building a bridge that ends halfway across the river. A weak Legal Aid Law could give Somaliland the appearance of reform while leaving the poor stranded on the same side of justice. The country does not need a law merely to fill the statute book. It needs a law that can carry the weight placed upon it—a law that opens the courthouse door not only in words, but in reality.**
The test should therefore be brutally simple: when a poor citizen arrives at a police station, a detention centre or the courthouse, will this law actually help him?
Will a lawyer be available?
Will that lawyer be able to meet him?
Will the person be informed of his rights?
Will financial eligibility prevent immediate assistance?
Will there be a remedy when an official obstructs access?
Will the system have enough money to function?
Will responsibility be clear between the legal-aid authority, police, prosecutors and courts?
And, above all, will the law still work when the person standing before it has no money, no influence and no powerful name?
Those are the questions Parliament should answer before the Bill is passed.
Because legal aid is ultimately not about offices, forms or administrative titles. It is about whether justice remains justice when the person seeking it is poor.
The crowded entrance of the Hargeisa Regional Court offers a fitting reminder. Behind every file moving through the hands of a blue-shirted clerk is a human being waiting for an outcome. Behind every police escort is a person whose liberty may depend on what happens next. Behind every anxious relative is a family carrying uncertainty. Behind every lawyer rushing through those corridors is an attempt to translate the abstract language of law into something real.
The law should meet those people there—not somewhere far behind another locked door.
Somaliland does not merely need a Legal Aid Law. **It needs a working legal-aid system: constitutionally coherent, financially accessible, institutionally lean, properly harmonised with existing laws, centred on beneficiaries, and equipped with teeth strong enough to enforce the rights it promises.
Parliament has the opportunity to build precisely that.
It should not settle for a law that merely hangs a sign above the door.
It should make sure the door actually opens.
