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DocumentingRecording rights and agreements so they can be verified

Honouring one another’s rights and agreements is necessary for preventing and resolving conflict. Parties, mediators, and adjudicators all know how difficult this can be when there is no record of those rights and agreements. If rights are not documented and made known to the community in a language that everyone understands, how can we be sure that they will be respected? If agreements are not recorded in writing, what evidence will parties have that the terms of their agreement are violated? Documenting shared social commitments through contracts, registrations, and other records is an important part of maintaining social cohesion. These documents should be recognised by the relevant community and ideally accessible physically or online.

Why is this a fundamental dispute resolution practice?

Documenting is important for ensuring that the rights and agreements of individuals are respected and if necessary, enforced. Oral understandings, while recognised and taken seriously in many communities around the world, rely heavily on social trust and the good will of those involved. This can make them more difficult to enforce when one or more parties does not comply with what was agreed.

In addition to helping parties prove when their rights and agreements have been violated, documenting is important for making rights known to others outside of a particular agreement. Without acknowledgement, understanding and buy-in from the surrounding community, individual rights will not be respected or protected. For this reason, it is critical that registrations, contracts, and legal rights be made public.

What are the active ingredients of documenting?

Publishing rights and agreements to ensure that they are respected.

Putting rights in writing and making these documents accessible to the public or to the parties involved helps ensure that they are honoured, protected, and if necessary, enforced.

Community support to respect and protect rights and agreements.

Public acknowledgement of property rights, businesses, and arrangements between family members is an important part of sustainable documentation.

What are people actually doing to make this happen?

Parties

Parties are recording their oral agreements in writing. This may take the form of a negotiation, mediation, arbitration, or litigation settlement. For agreements that may need to be enforced in the future, parties are paying a fee to register their agreements in court or with another respected authority.

Parties

Mediators and facilitators

Arbitrators , mediators and facilitators are ensuring that the agreements they help parties to reach are documented in writing and where possible, legally certified. Ideally, this is done in the native language of the parties involved as well as the official language of the relevant authorities, to minimise misunderstanding of the agreed-upon terms.

Mediators and facilitators

Police and probation officers

Police are informing parties of their rights in a transparent way as early as possible in the dispute resolution process. This can be achieved verbally but should also be done in writing – ideally in the native language of the parties involved. Police are also helping to ensure that people’s rights are respected and enforced.

Police and probation officers

Judges and justice leaders

Judges and justice leaders are creating user-friendly pathways for parties to register their identities and agreements in a way that will be recognised and respected by the community. They are working to integrate formal and informal dispute resolution processes so that decisions made through customary practices are acknowledged. This will help reduce conflicts over land, martial, and inheritance rights (just to name a few).

Judges and justice leaders

Innovators

Innovators are creating online platforms that help people register their identity and document rights and agreements for a low cost. They are designing visual¹ and user-friendly contracts that empower vulnerable populations to understand their rights and responsibilities. Some innovators are also helping people in rural areas connect with paralegals who can help them register their identity and rights in-person.

Innovators

What indicators can be used to monitor this practice?

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Procedural justice
(understanding, neutrality)

What makes documenting difficult?

Cost barriers

Registrations are an important way of documenting and publishing rights, but often come with high implementation costs due to their network effect. In order for registrations to reliably document people’s rights, a majority of transactions in a given community must be registered. This means that the costs of registrations often to do outweigh the benefits a community receives from the registration process overall.

More Resources

Margaret Hagan, Exploding the Fine Print: Designing Visual, Interactive, Consumer-Centric Contracts and Disclosures in Legal Tech, Smart Contracts and Blockchain (2019)

Justice Dashboard

Justice Dashboard

DocumentingRecording rights and agreements so they can be verified

Why is this a fundamental dispute resolution practice?

What are the active ingredients of documenting?

Publishing rights and agreements to ensure that they are respected.

Community support to respect and protect rights and agreements.

What are people actually doing to make this happen?

What indicators can be used to monitor this practice?

What makes documenting difficult?

Cost barriers

More Resources

Justice Dashboard

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