What is ALAC? ALAC stands for Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre. It is a new project set up by Transparency Vanuatu. ALAC provides legal advice and assistance to victims and witnesses of corruption. It helps citizens, from the unemployed to entrepreneurs, from public servants to business people, to pursue corruption-related complaints, encouraging them to come forward. ALAC observes strict client confidentiality.

The main goals of ALAC are to talk to people (clients), help them to resolve their complaints or cases, and use the information to advocate for change through legal reforms. In the TI multi-stakeholder tradition, it aims at creating dialogue, informal feedback, and working partnerships with government institutions charged with anti-corruption. This Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre seeks to translate citizens...’ concerns on corruption into structural changes for better local and national governance.

This centre provides legal assistance and counseling to the public on how to evaluate and lodge complaints in relation to potential corruption cases to the concerned authority or department such as Ombudsman's Office or Prosecutor's Office. ALAC assistance could be providing detailed legal recommendations or specific and concrete advice concerning the options available to concerned clients. For instance, if an individual as a client witnesses a wrongful situation at Lands Department where a public servant of this Department has requested a specific additional amount of money to push forward his or her file for diligent approval, this individual could seek further advice through ALAC to determine the options available for further actions to resolve this corruption-related matter.

ALAC's mandate is essentially limited to help citizens to develop, articulate and pursue complaints in corruption related matters/issues. It does not 'investigate' them to determine whether they are right or wrong. In other words, ALAC could be specifically conceived as a step prior to the submission of a complaint to government authorities as is required under the Ombudsman Act.

Section 18 (2) of the Ombudsman Act requires any person before approaching the Office of the Ombudsman to have lodged their com plaint with the Government agency about the conduct. ALAC can help the citizens to formulate as helpfully as possible their complaints to the Government agency. This should assist the Department to understand well the complaint and if not resolved the Office of the Ombudsman to look into it.

ALAC does not compete with these authorities nor duplicate the work done by these authorities. Furthermore, ALAC helps ensure that government agencies receive well developed complaints, making their investigation work easier. The Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre provides in fact a service to government agencies to assist them in their work. TI Vanuatu, 09/01/09.