Explore Data of Countries
Find out how people in different countries around the world experience justice. What are the most serious problems people face? How are problems being resolved? Find out the answers to these and more.
*GP – general population; *HCs – host communities; IDPs* – internally displaced persons
Justice Services
Innovation is needed in the justice sector. What services are solving justice problems of people? Find out more about data on justice innovations.
The Gamechangers
The 7 most promising categories of justice innovations, that have the potential to increase access to justice for millions of people around the world.
Justice Innovation Labs
Explore solutions developed using design thinking methods for the justice needs of people in the Netherlands, Nigeria, Uganda and more.
Creating an enabling regulatory and financial framework where innovations and new justice services develop
Rules of procedure, public-private partnerships, creative sourcing of justice services, and new sources of revenue and investments can help in creating an enabling regulatory and financial framework.
Forming a committed coalition of leaders
A committed group of leaders can drive change and innovation in justice systems and support the creation of an enabling environment.
Problems
Find out how specific justice problems impact people, how their justice journeys look like, and more.
What are key elements of the Civil Justice Innovation Goals formulated in the strategy? What can be learned from experience in other countries? And what can be done to strengthen these proposals, in light view of the targets set by the stakeholders?
Court procedures and legal services by lawyers can be effective. In most countries, they struggle to achieve sufficient scale: they reach few people. Research on the most promising justice services, how to standardise them and how to fund them is ongoing4.
The enrolment interviews also offered stakeholders the opportunity to relay their take on potential game-changers for Ogun State. Digitisation, ADR and more effective use of multi-door courthouses were mentioned most often. What is important is not necessarily the number of game-changing services identified, but more vital to people-centred transformation is ensuring that they are implemented, they work, and the people are able to measure them as accessible, easy and affordable.
In the stakeholder interviews and during the first dialogue, various ADR services were mentioned:
A next step might be to investigate how many people use these services. For multi-door courthouses, data are available, for instance in this paper (Emilia Onyema and Monalisa Odibo, How Alternative Dispute Resolution made a comeback in Nigerian Courts, 2017; see box below for a summary).
Interviewed experts routinely mentioned the multi-door courthouse as the best example of ADR in Ogun State. In the words of the Olota of Ota:
I think one of the best ways that we are witnessing now is the multi-door courthouse. Because people like us can adjudicate over issues and we are eager to ensure that people get justice.
Of the options available, the multi-door court house is still the most preferred to the court and the police in achieving solutions for civil justice problems in Ogun State. If the Multi-Door Court House is effective, it remains one of the best amongst the available options.
Among the positive elements of multi-door courthouse, the experts highlighted the low costs for disputants, the informal nature of the process, and the relatively quick manner in which disputes are resolved. Experts also stressed that resolving disputes through ADR and the multi-door courthouse helps to build and maintain relationships that might be damaged if the dispute is taken to court. At the same time, awareness about its existence and the opportunities it offers was highlighted as one of the major challenges for the multi-door courthouse, together with funding. In the words of the President of the Customary Court in Ota:
Interviewed experts routinely mentioned the multi-door courthouse as the best example of ADR in Ogun State. In the words of the Olota of Ota:
The multi-door courthouse has been trying, but unfortunately most people are not aware of its existence. The police is out of it entirely, but unfortunately that is still the first point of call of litigants when problems arise. When they leave the police with their issues, they would still be referred back to court to have their issues resolved.
Another major challenge raised by several experts was the lack of adequate funding for the multi-door courthouse. It seems that the Ogun State multi-door courthouse is a promising and widely supported initiative, which still has some room left to become a truly effective dispute resolution service.
We gathered the following findings on the multi-door courthouses in a number of states in Nigeria:
A number of game-changing services are increasingly on the radar screens of reformers in civil justice and criminal justice. These services exist in some form in most countries and have the potential to deliver effective solutions in a scalable and sustainable way.
Community justice services, one-stop dispute resolution services and people-centred innovation and advice are most likely to contribute to improvements in civil justice delivery. For land conflicts, user-friendly documents may be relevant as well. In many countries, such services already exist and can be scaled. This may require standardisation, investments and better models for ensuring sustainable revenues (for more information on scaling services see this chapter in HiiL’s 2021 trend report).
Community justice services are all about delivering high-quality, standardised forms of informal justice close to people’s homes. Although community justice services exist in different forms in different countries, they can be identified by three key characteristics:
Community justice services tend to be more common in rural settings than in cities.
Community justice services can suggest a recourse to formal courts or could be under the supervision of formal courts. They can also be connected to local or central government, with the potential to scale across borders. At the same time, their rootedness in specific communities may limit their potential to be really scalable.
HiiL’s online dashboard has a dedicated page for community justice services.
People seeking justice often need to find different services in completely different places, making the process of seeking justice unnecessarily complicated. Bringing these different services together in one place would therefore greatly improve and simplify the process for people lost in the justice system. This is why one-stop shops, platforms offering different dispute resolution services in one place, are a great way to improve access to justice.
At one location, these platforms connect the different stages of the justice process: diagnosis, advice, negotiation, mediation and adjudication. They can focus on all types of civil justice problems. The aim is to create an integrated ‘treatment’ that focuses on reaching an agreement between the parties, rather than a judgment. To facilitate such agreements, evidence-based approaches are used. One-stop dispute resolution platforms can be supported online as much as possible.
HiiL’s online dashboard has a dedicated page for platforms offering one-stop dispute resolution with examples and tools to develop business cases/financial models.
As the number of people able to access the internet continues to grow around the world, the number of justice services offering online information, advice, or representation has equally mushroomed.
The provision of people-centred online information and advice, combined with follow-up services, can really help people solve their legal problems in a step-by-step way. Such services can be run by law firms, motivated individuals, legal start-ups, charities and non-profit organisations, and sometimes even by the government.
Despite the potential of such websites and apps to offer a helpful starting point for people with legal problems, they require substantial investment to become effective self-help guides leading to higher rates of resolution. As a result, examples of these are still rare, even in high-income countries.
HiiL’s online dashboard has a dedicated page for people-centred online information.
In Ogun State, the yearly expected number of neighbour disputes is at least 140,000. Stakeholders aim to increase the number of disputes dealt with in communities.
To increase the capacity to solve and prevent neighbour disputes, stakeholders proposed:
Community justice services exist in many countries (see map on HiiL dashboard). Seven organisational models exist (see table below). One model is a generic informal justice model, depending on how informal justice is organised in each single community. Two models ensemble lawyer-representation models. One model is an interdisciplinary one. Three models are based on links between neutral courts and informal justice. These models are most close to what stakeholders proposed: local (informal) courts, justices of the peace and judicial facilitators.
Nokukhanya Ntuli (Africa: Alternative Dispute Resolution in a Comparative Perspective, Conflict Studies Quarterly 2018, p. 36) advises to build on existing informal justice mechanisms, as they exist already in many African communities. She warns against implementing “foreign” ADR concepts, without considering the lessons learned about ADR. One of these lessons is that the incentives to use ADR or informal justice need to be increased.
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Local delivery model | Focus justice problems | Focus in services | Follow-up services if not successful | Main revenue streams |
---|---|---|---|---|
Civil legal aid lawyers
| Disputes and crimes | Mediation, advocacy, navigating adjudication | Legal aid lawyers, formal court adjudication | Fees, NGOs, Ministry of justice |
Community paralegals
| Disputes and crimes
Issues with companies and state institutions | Education, mediation, monitoring, advocacy | Legal aid lawyers, formal court adjudication | NGOs, Community contributions |
Informal justice by local leaders and others
| Disputes and crimes | Mediation, adjudication | Any | Time from volunteers and officials |
Justices of the peace | Minor disputes and crimes | Mediation, adjudication | Referral to formal court adjudication | Judiciary |
Judicial facilitators | Disputes and crimes | Education, mediation | Integration with local court adjudication | Judiciary |
Local (informal courts) | Minor disputes and crimes | Mediation, adjudication | Enforcement in community | Local government |
Houses of justice | Disputes and crimes | Information, advice, referral | Any | Ministry of justice |
Her article is one of many overviews of existing mediation and adjudication practices in various regions that can help in understanding the variety of informal justice mechanisms that exist. Many attempts have been made to map community justice mechanisms in Yoruba communities (see Adeyinka Theresa Ajayi and Lateef Oluwafemi Buhari, Methods of Conflict Resolution in African Traditional Society, African Research Review 2014, p. 138 for one example).
The following elements of the proposal are very much supported by the literature:
The following suggestions can strengthen the proposal: