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4. Game-changing services proposed

Civil Justice Transformation in Ogun State / 4. Game-changing services proposed

Photo: Sebastian Voortman from Pexels

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?

4.1 Game-changing services initially proposed and considered

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.

Other experts concurred:

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.

IN FOCUS:
MULTI-DOOR COURTHOUSES

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

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

Platforms offering mandatory one-stop dispute resolution

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.

People-centred online information

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.

4.2 Integrated resolution for neighbour disputes

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. 

PROPOSAL:
Ogun people will develop and use informal/local dispute resolution mechanisms to resolve neighbour disputes.

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. 

Scroll left and right to view the whole table.

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: