We spent four years discussing them, recalls Lorena Pe a, a delegate for the FMLN who heads the assembly s Commission on Childhood, Family and Women. We listened to all the human rights organizations, all the lawyers associations, all the other interest groups, and we had tremendous debates among ourselves. The public debate has not stopped in the 18 months since the new criminal codes went into effect. But for Pe a, who herself disagrees with several key points in the criminal code, the long debate was essential to the reform s credibility. Nobody can claim that these laws are not the product of a consensus, she says.
Good laws are no guarantee of justice, of course.
To the extent that El Salvador s new codes are considered successful, it is because they required the creation of new points of access to justice and new procedures to make judicial services more efficient. To comply with the new family and juvenile codes, for example, the judiciary built and equipped dozens of new courtrooms that handle such cases exclusively. Almost from the day they opened in 1994, these new courts have been swamped. Pe a points to the example of domestic violence. Before the new family code was approved, around 300 cases of domestic violence were reported in El Salvador each year.