If you were the product of a common-law marriage, you could forget about receiving financial support from an unwilling father.

If you were a minor suspected of a felony, you would be headed for a jail cell crammed with hardened criminals twice your age, where you might wait for years to see a judge.

These are just a few of the situations that were technically legal in El Salvador until 1994. That is when the Legislative Assembly replaced the civil code in effect since 1860 with one of Latin America’s most progressive bodies of family law. A year later, the assembly passed new laws categorizing juvenile crimes and mandating separate rehabilitation and detention facilities for juvenile delinquents. In April 1998 it put into effect criminal and sentencing codes that specified several new categories of crimes, decreed new procedures for criminal investigations and trials, and set new rules for sentencing and the treatment of prisoners (For highlights, see A new legal landscape).

El Salvador is relatively unique in Latin America for having chosen to wipe the slate clean and draft new laws in these areas, which account for more than half of the activity in its courts. (All other areas, including commercial and labor law, remain under the old civil code.) Most other Latin countries have taken an incremental path, passing modifications to the civil code or changing an aspect of court procedures to improve efficiency, for example.

Several factors encouraged the all-or-nothing approach in El Salvador. One was the effect of the civil war, which exposed the link between human rights violations and the deficiencies in the country’s laws and its judicial procedures. The war also forced policymakers to acknowledge the yawning gap between El Sal-vador’s civil code and the social reality of most of the population. Thousands of children who had been orphaned or separated from their parents during the war were being held in makeshift government centers, for example. But since the civil code did not address such a situation, the government had no legal basis on which to create policies for the long-term care or placement of these children. Likewise, a postwar study showed that nearly half of all Salvadoran couples with children were not legally married. Because of the narrow definition of marriage in the civil code, these families lived in a legal vacuum where it was impossible to resolve disputes over child custody, assets or other issues.

El Salvador’s civil code also did not reflect rights and principles articulated in its 1983 constitution and in treaties (such as the International Convention on the Rights of Children and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), that had been ratified by its Legislative Assembly. “We looked at our 1860 legislation, and we said, ‘Where are the rights of children? Where are the rights of women? Where are the rights of the family?’” recalls María Teresa de Mejía, who now heads the Salvadoran Institute for the Protection of Minors. People were asking the same question about the rights of prisoners and of torture victims and about other problems—such as government corruption and industrial pollution—that were not contemplated in the 1860 code.

The questions were more than academic, because in the civil law tradition a criminal act can only be punished if it is explicitly described in the law.

A public debate. Starting in the mid-1980s, small technical teams in succeeding Salvadoran governments used financial support from the United States Agency for International Development and later the United Nations to produce draft versions of laws that might fill these gaps. In addition to codifying constitutional rights and specifying new kinds of crimes, the drafts proposed an entirely new kind of judicial process based on oral trials dominated by public prosecutors and defenders (see articles I'll see you in court! and A new legal landscape).

Knowing that the new laws would not be approved in the Legislative Assembly without broad public support, the Ministry of Justice launched an extensive program of public consultation for each one, publishing the drafts around the country and calling for comments from interested parties. The family and juvenile codes, though controversial, gained immediate support from a broad range of interest groups and passed relatively quickly.

The criminal codes were a different story. “We spent four years discussing them,” recalls Lorena Peña, 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. Numerous modifications have been made to the original laws, and proposals for additional changes are being debated by the current assembly (see article Justice for whom? ). But for Peña, 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.

How successful? 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. Peña 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. After the law passed and the new courts began operating, they registered 14,000 cases in one year.”

Francisco Díaz, a member of El Salvador’s National Judicial Council, says the popularity of these courts is partly due to Salvadoran women’s growing confidence in the possibility of obtaining legal redress. “The chances that a woman in conflict with her husband will get a favorable judgement are much, much greater than before,” he says.

The family and juvenile courts do not simply issue verdicts, however. The new laws give the state responsibility for assisting families and juveniles beyond the sentencing stage through specially designated social workers and psychologists who monitor cases and subsequently advise the courts. Juvenile delinquents, for example, are turned over to the Salvadoran Institute for the Protection of Minors, which runs comprehensive rehabilitation programs at centers that are entirely separate from the regular prison system. IDB funds are now being used to renovate, equip and expand these centers.

Although it is still too early to assess the effects of the new criminal codes, there is at least one indicator that no one disputes. “The average criminal case under the old code took between two-and-a-half and three years to resolve,” says justice René Hernández Valiente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1994 after serving as Minister of Justice. “Today, the average is around four months.”

The new codes have also improved access to the judicial system by vastly expanding the authority of the country’s 323 justices of the peace. These officials, who operate courtrooms in each of the country’s municipalities, must now have law degrees and pass competitive exams administered by the National Judicial Council. These qualifications are necessary because justices of the peace now handle a broad array of cases that would previously have been passed on to superior courts. In addition to keeping minor cases from clogging the higher courts, this arrangement allows people of limited means to resolve their legal problems more quickly and closer to where they live.