On 3 and 4 March 2025, the Foundation successfully facilitated a validation workshop on the Code of Judicial Conduct for the Judiciary of South Sudan. The validation workshop, which was held in Juba, South Sudan, was attended by selected members of the Judiciary of South Sudan.
The workshop sought to validate draft amendments to the Code of Judicial Conduct which had been proposed during two previous roundtables with members of South Sudan’s Judiciary. The participants at the validation workshop debated, made further amendments as necessary, and approved each draft amendment. This exercise yielded an Amended Code of Judicial Conduct, 2025, that will come into force upon its signing by the Rt. Hon Chief Justice of the Republic of South Sudan. The validation workshop was the culmination of a two-year process which entailed holding workshops on judicial ethics with almost all the judges and justices of South Sudan’s Judiciary, followed by roundtables with select members of the Judiciary, who were tasked with further fine-tuning the recommendations from the workshops into possible amendments to the Code.
The validation workshop was attended by senior members of South Sudan’s Judiciary, including the Chief Justice, Rt. Hon. Chan Reec Madut, Deputy Chief Justice, Hon. Dr John Gatwech Lul and the Head of Training of the Judiciary of South Sudan and Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Dr Benjamin Baak Deng. The selected members of the Judiciary who attended the roundtable were drawn from various levels of South Sudan’s Judiciary including the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, High Court and various lower-level courts.
This roundtable was implemented with the generous financial assistance of the European Union within the framework of the project ‘Supporting Constitution-Making, Legal Harmonisation and Judicial Reform in South Sudan’.