EDITORIAL
Access to Justice- The ability of a litigant or litigants to seek redress from a formal or informal institution of justice for the infringement of his, her, or their legally protected interests or to exculpate themselves from an alleged liability or charge.
When , some years ago, with his tongue no doubt firmly fixed in cheek, the Prime Minister, Mr. Errol Barrow [as he then was], advised citizens seeking justice to steer clear of Coleridge Street [then the location of the courts], it might have been taken by some as merely another example of the brash irreverence for which he was noted.
As most people would, Mr. Barrow back then was clearly making the assumption that justice was to be found in a legal solution, even though he was simultaneously and iconoclastically disparaging the notion that that solution might be obtained in the local courts of law. We must confess that we remain unsure to this day whether he was simply making the time-worn jurisprudential distinction between law and justice or whether he was cheekily suggesting that that the decisions of the local courts were rarely consistent with the just solution.
Even in more recent times, some disgruntled litigant or other, given to the belief that his or her disappointed cause was the just one in the circumstances, will often refer to this aphorism in the latter sense.
Our attention was once more drawn to this discussion of access to justice by a piece in the Sunday Advocate about a fortnight ago, where Baroness Scotland, the Commonwealth Secretary General, advanced the thesis that while access to justice for all was not yet a reality, there were ways forward to achieve this goal. She writes; “…studies indicate that of the 1.4 billion people who, for whatever reason, in the past two years felt the need for recourse to law, less than half have had their justice needs met. Barriers such as cost, complexity and corruption cause people either not to seek redress, or to be defeated by the process.
"The 53 countries of the Commonwealth are committed to taking action to right this wrong. Each member country is committed through our Commonwealth Charter to: ‘an independent, effective and competent legal system’ which ‘is integral to upholding the rule of law, engendering public confidence and dispensing justice”.
While recourse to law, as the Secretary General puts it, might be the most traditional mode of obtaining justice, it is of course not the only one. If we posit justice to be the acquisition of one’s socio-economic entitlements in democratic society, then it is clear that there might be less formal means of accessing justice other than the traditionally formal. Self-help, for example, or appeals to political power might prove to be far more effective and cheaper modes of access than the traditional court action.
Take, for instance, current social problems such as that of infrequent garbage collection or of sporadic access to water. The victims of these shortcomings may persuasively argue that they are being denied justice (their just deserts) by the deprivation of the social benefit in each case. However, the formal judicial solution to these injustices is likely to be both comparatively costly and slow, where it is clear that immediacy should be the hallmark of any just solution.
We shall return to this important topic periodically. These words from the article by the Secretary General resonate in any such debate however; “Our priority has to be to answer the needs of all people, and particularly those such as the poor and unemployed, victims of domestic violence, refugees and disabled…people whose experience far too often is to feel marginalized or ill-served by judicial processes.”