We are proud to publish the report of the Innovation Working Group of the Task Force on Justice. The Innovation Working Group was asked to review the evidence of unmet justice needs, explore the potential for innovation, explore the investment possibilities for promising innovation areas, provide parameters for enhancing innovation for SDG16.3, and to make recommendations on these matters to the Task Force on Justice.
It concludes that the access to justice gap in the world is huge. Justice systems are not meeting the needs of people in a serious way. We will need innovation to deal with this problem. We must challenge some of our basic assumptions about what justice systems must do and how they do that.
- Justice should be re-framed in terms of the justice needs of people and the fairness of their relationships. We need a focus on outcomes.
- Justice systems must also open-up and let others in besides lawyers.
- We must also start seeing costs differently: justice systems don’t only cost money; they also provide ‘revenue’ and benefits in the social and economic sense.
- We have seen the emergence of new technologies and services, both very new technological advances and 21st century upgrades of ancient traditions, that are available to close the justice gap.
- It is also necessary to open up when it comes to financing justice innovation.
- The report ends with some suggestions about what is needed from whom to make this change happen.
