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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

Provisional Programme.pdf

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Published: August 4, 2022

Carlota Ucín was invited to participate in a Seminar organised at the University of Barcelona on the topic: Consumer rights and housing, financing and dispute resolution. Her talk ‘Las formas del litigio de interés público y la tutela de los consumidores’ (The shapes of public interest litigation and the effective protection of consumers), focused on the characteristics of public interest litigation in the Global South, the reasons that can explain its evolution and the shapes it adopted in the Argentinean experience. She proposed the importance of applying the ‘public interest approach’ in order to facilitate access to justice of consumers in general and in the cases of housing claims in particular. This debate became particularly timely due to the discussion in Spain of a draft regulation related to the improvement of efficiency in civil procedures.