Newsletter - January 2010

Access to Justice

On Thursday 5 November 2009, the Department of International Law held the first Workshop on Access to Justice at its offices, with the purpose of promoting knowledge on the subject within the Organization and in line with the mandate of the Declaration of Principles of the Second Summit of the Americas (Santiago, Chile, 18-19 April 1998).

The workshop consisted of a series of presentations by guest experts on the subject. The panelists included Javier La Rosa, professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru; Linn Hammergren and Richard Messick, of the World Bank; Stefano Tinari, of the Inter-American Development Bank; and Katya Salazar of the Due Process of Law Foundation.

Among the points addressed in the workshop, the speakers agreed that Access to Justice is a basic right of all people, and that it was therefore necessary to have a reliable and accurate data base on the magnitude of the problem in the region. They underlined the importance of joining efforts to set shared and specific objectives for improving practices and methods to eliminate all barriers to the right of access to justice. The experts also referred to new trends in dealing with the subject, so that cooperation in the area of Access to Justice should seek to resolve problems that extend beyond access to courts and propose processes for integrating existing justice systems in given territories, taking advantage of traditional means of conflict resolution already in place.

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