Trends in the Justice Innovation Space

The Innovating Justice Forum 2020 (Photo credit: HiiL)

ChangeFusion and the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ) participated in the Innovating Justice Forum hosted by HiiL (The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law) at The Hague between 3rd – 5th February, 2020 as the representatives from Thailand.

The theme of this years’ forum is to explore financial or funding sources and schemes that could be deployed to drive justice innovations. Sector experts, practitioners, entrepreneurs, innovators were brought together to exchange insights and ideas as well as to brainstorm collectively innovative ways to draw in more resources to transform the justice sector.

What is HiiL?

HiiL is a social enterprise devoted to user-friendly justice and to make justice accessible to all. It was founded in 2005 in The Hague, the Netherlands, aka the International City of Peace and Justice.

What does HiiL do?

• Research & publications – investigate different aspects of the justice sector in order to identify key barriers and dead ends that are preventing people from accessing justice.

• Support justice innovations – the Justice Entrepreneurship School under HiiL conducts a yearly, global search for best justice innovations to support. Incubation and grants are given to help entrepreneurs grow and scale their ideas.

• Support transformative collaboration – convene stakeholders from different sectors to work together to tackle the most pressing justice issues.

14 Finalists of the Innovating Justice Award hosted by HiiL (Photo credit: HiiL)

Breakout session of the Innovating Justice Forum (Photo credit: HiiL)

Why the need to innovate justice?

• Although social innovation has been increasingly cited around the globe as a new means to tackle the complex social problems that we face nowadays, the justice sector in most countries remains relatively conservative, without major changes for tens if not hundred of years.

• SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, including SDG 16.3 Justice for All, has been the least emphasized among the 17 SDGs. According to FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, among all the funds and investments that were mobilized to support the SDGs, only 1% fell into SDG16, which still leaves an enormous gap to deliver justice to the 5 billion people around the world that are still excluded from the system.

• SDG 16 is indeed an important foundation for the achievement of other SDGs such as gender equality, poverty alleviation and so on since a legal framework would be needed for proper execution of justice on these issues.

Trends and key takeaways from the forum

1. Enhancing solutions with technology
   
   Similar to social innovations, technology also plays a critical role in justice innovations. For instance, HiiL itself is creating a database for big data analysis in order to identify the most pressing issues in the justice sector to tackle. Crimesync, the award winner of HiiL’s Justice Accelerator in 2019, digitized and connected data of all the agencies and departments involved in the legal proceedings of criminal cases to increase the overall efficiency of the legal system.
   
   In addition to making justice-related work more data-driven, technology in terms of automation and AI (artificial intelligence) has transformed legal document generation. Automation has largely reduced costs and make the process much more convenient and accessible to the general public. Chatbots are also increasingly common as tools deployed to provide preliminary legal consultation on various issues, such as divorce and disputes related to business, employment and land rights.

2. Empowering grassroots with knowledge
   
   Despite the large number of people around the world who still do not have access to justice, it is important to start empowering them with knowledge. Very often, actions and decisions are automatically outsourced to lawyers or legal experts due to a lack of basic legal knowledge among the people.
   
   Indeed numerous justice innovations showcased in the forum have placed a strong emphasis on legal knowledge dissemination, delivering simply, easy-to-digest communication material through channels that are readily accessible even to those who are disadvantaged. By empowering people with the knowledge and tools, they would be able to better decide for themselves how they would use the justice system to help achieve the best outcomes.

3. Cross-sector collaborations
   
   There could hardly be any new innovations if we only let lawyers talk to lawyers. It would be vital to bring in new stakeholders and thus new perspectives if the ultimate goal is to make justice more user-friendly. Innovations and breakthroughs often come when we engage the unusual allies. Collaborations also have the potential to unlock new resources from different sectors which helps to deliver and scale impacts which would not be achieved otherwise if different actors and stakeholders continue to work in silos. In terms of SDGs, since SDG16 often goes hand in hand with the other SDGs, practitioners and innovators in the justice sector may explore collaboration opportunities with other social projects such as environmental conservation, poverty alleviation, to leverage the existing funding available.