Anton Shelupanov
Last week Stephen and I were fortunate to attend the Innovating Justice Forum in the Netherlands, hosted by the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL). The institute is the hub of a global network of justice innovators, mostly coming from a civil justice background. We met innovators from five continents, with a vast range of specialisms – from a judge who hears patent cases in Belgium to an African television presenter who travels around Mozambique helping to mediate labour disputes between staff and employers in the private sector.
What struck me most was how separate us and other colleagues in the criminal justice sector appeared. There is so much innovation going on in the civil justice sector – for example in the world of alternative dispute resolution, or in terms of innovative civil court procedures, or indeed social projects which assist vulnerable people undergoing the trauma of a divorce. Much of it has little to do with crime, but everything to do with justice.
In criminal justice we tend to be very quick to talk about the need to learn from other sectors, for example education or healthcare. This is not wrong, there is a wealth of social innovation happening in those settings, and we would be wrong to ignore useful and adaptable lessons from anywhere. But we rarely think about looking closer to home, in the justice sector itself, but away from crime and in the civil arena.
The forum we attended culminated in Innovating Justice Awards 2013. One winner was Ushahidi – a crisis reporting platform. At first it was difficult to see how such a tool could be used in the justice arena but when you considered that in fast moving crisis situations victims of injustices often don’t have a voice it began to make sense. It could be used to report hugely serious crimes, such as ethnic cleansing but providing specific individual accounts of such activities. But it could also be used to address issues of social injustice such as extrajudicial confiscation of property.
As with any other area, of course it will bring some extremes. One of the speakers was a former head of dispute resolution at a well known online trading platform and he argued for doing away with justice systems altogether and replacing them with software. Such an approach will not always be applicable. But the main benefit of having the opportunity to interact with so many colleagues from the world of civil justice was that it sparked new thinking in our criminal justice focussed minds.