E/CN.4/2003/90/Add.2 page 14 reported that the independence of the communities was not respected during the appointment and in the work of the community justices of the peace, and that a number of solutions devised at the local level, such as the centres for the administration of justice, do not receive the budgetary support they need. The Office for the Defence of Q’eqchi’ Rights drew the Special Rapporteur’s attention to four cases of human rights violations in the municipality of El Estor in the department of Izabal: (a) Violation of the right to justice in one’s own language; (b) Denial of access to justice to an illiterate indigenous woman; (c) Violation of ILO Convention No. 169, by operators in oil concessions in Izabal; (d) Non-compliance with the Urban and Rural Development Councils Act to the detriment of the indigenous communities of the region. The Office concludes that “for the Q’eqchi’ Maya people in Izabal, and especially in El Estor, the denial of access to justice is a fact of life”. 35. It is noteworthy that many of the situations reported to the Special Rapporteur, which have been drawn to the attention of the judicial authorities, the Public Prosecutor’s Office or the National Civil Police, are examined in criminal courts in the form of offences, with the procedural and social consequences that this implies. It is reported that, as a result of this phenomenon, the justices of the peace, who are competent to hear and rule on criminal cases at first instance, have in practice expanded this sphere of competence to handle family-related, economic, civil, land, commercial and other matters, clearly on the basis of a categorization of incidents as offences rather than as cases of conflicting rights and interests. As a consequence of this practice of criminalizing social problems, the judicial officials are failing to abate tensions in society, and in many cases are exacerbating them. ILO is engaged in a project to strengthen the legal capabilities of the indigenous peoples in Central America. In Guatemala this project has focused on violations of the collective rights of the indigenous peoples. Systematic examples include: (a) Obstructing access to a sacred site in Sololá for Mayan spiritual guides; (b) The transfer and restitution of land belonging to a rural teacher training school which was occupied by the army during the armed conflict. This case was settled satisfactorily 20 years later, in January 2003; (c) Defence of Mayan communities against accusations of responsibility for lynchings and the insinuation that such incidents are characteristic of Mayan culture. Requirement that Mayan law should be applied to cases of conflict in the Q’eqchi’ communities in Alta Verapaz; (d) Legal defence of the land rights of K’iche’ Maya communities in Totonicapan. Source: ILO. Casos sistematizados sobre violaciones a derechos colectivos de los pueblos indígenas (Systematic violations of the collective rights of the indigenous peoples). February-May 2002.