Courts & Justice Systems

The Center for Court Innovation is renowned for its work reforming the New York criminal justice systems with ambitious, cutting-edge projects and offering its technical expertise across the US and internationally to jurisdictions seeking to reform their own systems. This session explored the three principles that drive the Center's work and how they translate into practice and programming: just outcomes, procedural fairness, and community justice. The session shared some of the lessons learned from the Center's efforts and invited attendees to share and troubleshoot their own efforts at justice reform. The experience of the Center for Court Innovation highlighted three key lessons learned. First, while outcome fairness traditionally has been measured by the determination of whether the conviction has been properly achieved, a just outcome should also consider whether the disposition and sentence is seen as appropriate in the eyes of a victim and the community. Second, procedural justice should be emphasized, and, third, justice reforms should embrace community justice.

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Additional Resources:

Court systems around the world are recognizing that to truly deliver justice, they must modernize both their host systems and their approaches. This session first described the trends and successes in automation, such as the use of Legal XML to standardize and streamline the eFiling and eService submission process, as well as the challenges of sustainability and public access. To address these challenges, speakers recommended the use of open sources and widely used software. The session then looked at how Online Dispute Resolution has enabled new approaches in the area of high-volume, low-value claims important to everyday litigants by leveraging features such as asynchronous communication, legal information and triage, mediation and negotiation spaces, and document creation, storage, and court payment.

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Additional Resources:

This session explored how enhancing the functions of traditional rulers in their communities has been an important part of rebuilding, conflict reduction, and building community cohesion in the aftermath of a crisis. Focusing on the northeastern Nigerian states that were subject to the Boko Haram insurgency, participants examined questions regarding the interface between formal and informal systems. Specific techniques – including hosting training sessions where traditional rulers acquire expertise in where their jurisdiction should end and how to transfer these cases to the formal sector, hosting training sessions that inform traditional rulers about cultural differences and ways to employ these differences in the decision making process, and hosting workshops where traditional rulers, judges, police and the media convene and discuss ways in which the challenges they face can be tackled by policy reform – informed a lively discussion about effective strategies for community level informal justice.

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Additional Resources:

This session explored how and why African courts have developed as they did, and what they need to move effectively into the future. Using Burkina Faso as a test case, it looked specifically at how systems change theory can be applied to African courts to address the critical problems of trust and performance and create a more effective and just system moving forward.To this end, USIP leverages the following four principles at each stage in the process: Act locally – need to act within a system if you are addressing a complex system; Act deeply – follow a process that allows them to move from local events to broader patterns; define high leverage points; Act collectively – involve all systemic actors, “bring the system in the room” to move towards a shared understanding of the overall system; Act iteratively.

Additional Resources:

When citizens are mistreated by people in power they often have little capacity to ensure justice. Citizen Helpdesks are pioneering a feedback process through which citizens use information to work with power-holders to fix problems and then disseminate information about the changes, ensuring better and more equal access to everything from healthcare to justice. This session discussed how closing the feedback loop in this way has built trust and transformed governance in Liberia, Mali, and Nepal. The first step in the Citizen Helpdesk cycle is listening. Communities select groups of volunteers who work to collect and later disseminate information. These volunteers function as community frontline associates (CFAs) and interact face-to-face with different stakeholders in the community to understand what problems they currently face. Next, these volunteers routinely gather information on critical problems using community surveys. Once collected, these data are analyzed, checked and synthesized by the Accountability Lab. The information is then disseminated to facilitate conversations with all of the pertinent local stakeholders using the most impactful mediums tailored to the local context, such as radio shows and community meetings. This process ensures that everyone understands how and when something will happen, which builds accountability into decision-making processes and closes the feedback loop that often exists between citizens, governments, the media, and the private sector. 

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Additional Resources:

Bridging the "justice gap" requires a mechanism to connect the beleaguered rights holder with the distant duty bearer. Among the most powerful and promising bridges is strategic human rights litigation. This session focused on Open Society Justice Initiative’s global multi-year study of good practices which demonstrates the ability of marginalized communities to win unlikely victories. OSJI’s findings included that there is a growing demand for justice through litigation as a means to bridge the justice gap. Individual strategic litigation cases should not be viewed as win-lose situations, but instead as a process where cases brought can help to change the political climate and public opinion and increase opportunity for positive changes later on, and that in order to be effective, implementation of court decisions must happen. Other key takeaways from the session included strategic litigation’s important role in bringing about structural changes, the fact that law must play a role in consolidating open societies, and the recognition that courts are one of the few places where activists can directly challenge power.

Read the full summary for this working session. 

Additional Resources: