Book: Juicio a la desigualdad (Inequality on Trials)
News
Sustaining Access to Justice in Europe: New Avenues for Costs and Funding
The team of the NWO Vici project ‘Affordable Access to Justice’ at Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University (Rotterdam), is organising the conference ‘Sustaining Access to Justice in Europe: New Avenues for Costs and Funding’ on 19 and 20 October 2023 at the Erasmus Paviljoen at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Access to civil justice is of paramount importance for enforcing citizens’ rights. At the heart of access to civil justice lies litigation funding and cost management. Yet, over the past decades, access to justice has been increasingly put under pressure due to retrenching governments, high costs of procedure, and the inefficiency of courts and justice systems. Within this context, the funding of litigation in Europe seems to be shifting from public to private sources. Private actors and innovative business models emerged to provide new solutions to the old problem of financial barriers of access to justice.
With the participation of policymakers, practitioners, academics, and civil society representatives from all over Europe and beyond, the conference seeks to delve deeper into the financial implications of access to justice and the different ways to achieve sustainable civil justice systems in Europe.
The topics addressed in this international academic conference will include the different methods of financing dispute resolution, particularly in the context of group litigation (third-party funding, crowdfunding, blockchain technologies), public interest litigation, developments in ADR/ODR, the new business models of legal professionals as well as law and economics aspects on litigation funding. The conference is supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Find the link to registration here.
Please find the preliminary conference programme below.
Call for papers Vici Conference Sustainable justice 2023.pdf
Conference_Programme_2023_(1).pdf (euciviljustice.eu)
Published: September 23, 2021
Carlota Ucín has recently published this book, that is part of her PhD thesis. As she refers, Human Rights represent —today more than ever— a shared morality that guides us towards subsistence as cohesive communities. From this perspective, Public Interest Litigation becomes fundamental as a way of achieving the enforcement of these rights and to some extent, social change. This practice took shape in most of the countries of the so-called Global South after the latest constitutional reforms. It then emerged there as a body of lawsuits oriented by the Public Interest and tending to give effect to the social rights promised in the Constitutions but violated in practice. However, the phenomenon is not exclusive to these countries, and we are beginning to see signs of this in the so-called climate change crisis litigation.
The first debates in the legal theory field were linked to the possibility of ensuring the judicial enforceability of these rights and to the role of the courts in this new scenario. The dialectic was oriented, centrally, towards the demonstration of the analogies that exist between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social rights on the other. In practice, the lack of specific regulations replicated —at its turn— the existence of social inequalities. First because of the limited access to justice and then because of the overuse of the procedural instruments specific to individual rights.
JUICIO A LA DESIGUALDAD suggests an alternative view, which at the same time serves as a guide for the new forms of litigation emerging. For this, the author analyses the theoretical and institutional difficulties derived from social rights and suggests the elaboration of categories according to their speciality. She develops her argument in two parts, the first specifies the reasons why social rights should not be totally equated with civil and political rights, showing, instead, the convenience of a specific theoretical and procedural treatment. The second part is based on the experience of Public Interest Litigation and sets out the guidelines that will serve for the development of a collective procedural paradigm —with participatory and deliberative bases— that allows ensuring the effective protection of these rights.