Courts & Justice Systems

Key tasks for these sessions will be to articulate the narrative regarding justice and its relationship to other outcomes to support future advocacy, developing strategies for promoting key messages and themes in important venues and communities, articulating metrics for measuring progress, and defining what success will look like. 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a variety of Hague-based institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Participants will learn from justice sector case studies, movements in other sectors, and communications experts how to better understand, practice, and deploy the wide range of communications tools and techniques available to achieve their messaging goals.

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.” 

Working Sessions are concurrent workshops, interactive dialogues and facilitated discussions hosted by a wide variety of global and local institutions around pressing issues and opportunities related to the Forum’s theme of “Realizing Justice for All.”

This working session focused on the need for recognition of the role of community paralegals, justice
advocates and independent justice service providers in realizing access to justice. It discussed policies that
create enabling environments for community-based paralegals, such as effective legal aid policies, the
recognition of paralegals in law, and formalized working structures. The session also discussed the
necessary safeguards needed to ensure their independence and sustainability, including the need to
sufficiently resource paralegal efforts. Participants debated the responsibilities, scope of work, and models
of funding for community paralegals. The session highlighted recognition efforts in diverse contexts,
including the importance of political recognition, and sought to clarify the relationships to, and distinctions
from, other professionals in the justice sector and other related services. It offered concrete discussion of
how national policies can support and promote accessibility of community-based justice providers.

Read the full summary for this working session. 

A deficiency in global law is the gap in legal remedies available to those affected by transnational enterprises. The creation of the Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration intends to help close this gap. This session discussed the utility of international dispute resolution in the field of business and human rights and the viability of the Hague Rules to enable businesses and people to resolve their disputes in a consensual and legally binding way. The session highlighted that an arbitration solution to this specific aspect of the justice gap may be attractive to both corporations and victims due to its properties of neutrality, enforceability of cross border arbitral awards, and procedural flexibility of both the applicable law and the process. The main challenge, on the other hand, is that arbitration is a voluntary, consent-based process. Among the central issues under consideration for the continued development of the Hague Rules are the four key areas of consent, composition, confidentiality, and cost. 

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Family justice issues are among the top legal problems that must be solved through people centered,
evidence based approaches. But how to implement this mantra? During this session, family justice experts
reflected on recommendations for parents and justice workers who have to deal with justice issues around
separation/divorce. Speakers emphasized that the evidence collected for evidence-based approaches
should focus on outcomes, and that practitioners should leverage interdisciplinary approaches to family
justice. Speakers also flagged the need to stop investing in solutions that do not work and focus on
methods that have proven to be more effective, but recognized that this requires making administrative
changes that would facilitate practitioners’ ability to put evidence-based findings into practice. Looking
ahead, Speakers agreed that more evidence was needed to develop policies and put findings into practice
to ensure better justice outcomes. 

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Customary and informal justice systems provide vital pathways to everyday justice, and are essential to fulfilling the promise of justice for all reflected in SDG16. Discussion focused on how efforts to achieve SDG16 can engage with the opportunities and challenges associated with justice pluralism. There is no possibility of realizing this ambitious goal of justice for all by 2030 without considering, and carefully evaluating, the vital role of customary and informal justice systems. Customary and informal systems present unique advantages. These systems are the only dispute resolution fora available in some communities, and therefore allow people to seek justice when they would otherwise be excluded entirely. These systems often have high levels of use and acceptance in the communities that they serve because they are geographically closer, faster to resolve disputes, trusted more than formal court-based systems, more cost effective to use, and are more familiar in terms of linguistic and cultural relevancy. Yet, all justice systems—whether formal or informal—have shortcomings. Therefore, it is particularly important to consider how informal systems treat vulnerable and marginalized groups within their respective communities. Ultimately, improving outcomes should be the goal when engaging the complexities of legal pluralism and customary systems.

Read the full summary for this working session.