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Disasters significantly reduce the accessibility of justice particularly in rural locations. The bushfires, which ravaged three states in the south-east of Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, have had catastrophic social and economic impacts on people, animals and places in rural areas. In the aftermath of disasters, people by necessity must inevitably avail themselves of legal advice and services: to negotiate new business contracts; re-mortgage property; access wills and testaments; attend court; and for a host of other matters. In rural communities, where access to legal services is already limited by distance and circumstance, disasters create increased demand, and access issues are accentuated. This chapter explores access to justice issues in post-disaster context and as they relate to rural, regional and remote communities. It draws upon post-disaster experiences nationally and internationally, outlining responses to improve access to legal services past and present, identifying effective responses. It argues that rurality creates additional barriers and reduces access to justice, and that disasters exacerbate existing access issues as well as creating new challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of location on access to justice for vulnerable defendants seeking bail.

Qualitative interviews were conducted with legal practitioners from rural, suburban and urban areas as part of a larger study into bail support services in Victoria, Australia.

Interview participants identified a dearth of bail support resources in rural, regional and remote (RRR) areas compared to their urban counterparts. This dearth impacted negatively on some defendants’ outcomes in the justice system, particularly for young people and those experiencing homelessness.

This study helps in improving policy through greater understanding of issues with RRR service provision; adds to knowledge for service providers on access to justice; highlights specific areas of concern for vulnerable populations; and provides a more nuanced understanding of location-based issues.

This research found that resourcing issues cannot be understood simply through an RRR/urban binary and that more complex factors impacting access to justice and access to services for vulnerable people should be incorporated into future analysis and policy development. This more nuanced understanding is useful across national and international contexts when developing policies to improve bail support service provision.

Examines access to justice, within the Australian context of an adversarial system, from a consumer’s perspective. It is argued that the current system of justice represents the most conservative element of Australian society and that the courtroom discourse structure and the legal professional code of practice do little to ensure access to justice or quality of service. Inequality in communication and in the distribution of wealth, affecting all spheres of social life, especially the legal system, pose major barriers to access to justice. Stemming from these two principal barriers to equality in access to justice, a multitude of other barriers are perceived to exist. These perceived barriers are magnified by various platforms of social and political analysis as well as historical, contextual factors and administrative action. Attention is drawn to the emerging need for a continuous alignment of administrative and justice systems with democratic justice principles and global social changes.

Librarians have been urged to emphasize social justice and human rights issues in their library mission, but they may find themselves challenged to provide additional services, such as access to legal information for those who cannot afford an attorney. Social justice services in libraries are seldom adequately funded and providing services in this area is labor intensive. In addition, there is an emotional intensity in library services for social justice that is often not considered in the initial enthusiasm of providing services in this area. Yet there seems to be no limit to the need. An interesting and useful perspective on how a public agency such as a library responds in circumstances of limited resources and unlimited demand can be found in the book Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, by Michael Lipsky. In this perspective, lower level civil servants who interact directly with members of the general public exercise a level of discretion in the amount of services provided and how those services are administered. This chapter explores how this can generate tensions between more traditional library bureaucracy and social justice services, such as providing public access to justice resources in law libraries. However, the “street-level” response is evolving into a sustainability perspective as librarians embrace a more social justice–oriented outlook in library service planning.

The research sought to explore the role of public law libraries in advancing the net of persons who could access justice, using the law clinic in Nigeria as a gateway. It also examined how public law libraries could fit in drawing justice closer to the people using law clinics.

In achieving the research intentions, the researcher adopted mixed research approach. For the doctrinal method, the study embraced a desktop review of relevant literature on law clinic, access to justice and law libraries. For non-doctrinal method, the researcher brought to bare, his observation, experience and participation in clinical legal education, law clinic and law librarianship for a period of almost a decade. The literature and the experience of the researcher formed the basis on which the paper was developed.

The findings from this research reveal that access to justice is constrained by a number of factors that make it impossible for many Nigerians to access justice. The study further brings to the fore the role of law clinics in widening the gap of access to justice. In addition, the place of public law libraries in expanding the frontiers of access to justice is further underscored.

Not minding the potentials of public libraries in advancing access to justice world over, perusal of literature reveals that there is dearth of literature on the role of public law libraries in advancing access to justice through the instrumentality of law clinics in Nigeria. This research appears to be pioneering research in this regard.

Access to justice is both a topic of engaged social-legal research and a key component of legal professional ideology. There is a relationship between the two. The more committed the organized legal profession to the issue of access to justice, the higher the profile of scholarly research on topics that relate in one form or another to access to justice. The organized bar's commitment peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, waned in the 1980s, and has not regained the position it once had on the domestic U.S. agenda. In contrast, however, access to justice has recently emerged strongly on the reform agenda that U.S. and multilateral foreign aid organizations – along with the U.S. legal profession – are promoting abroad as part of the renewed post Cold War effort to build the rule of law.

The study aimed to listen to refugee survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and/or torture and explore what justice meant to them in exile. This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. The research was funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.

Using a survivor-focussed justice lens combined with a trauma-informed approach, narrative interviews were held with 41 women and 20 men refugee survivors living in refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. The researchers also conducted semi-structured interviews with 37 key informants including refugee welfare councils, the UN, civil society, non-government and government organisations. Thematic analysis of the data resulted in the following themes being identified: no hope of formal justice for atrocities that occurred in South Sudan; insecurity; lack of confidence in transitional justice processes in Ugandan refugee settlements; abuse and loss of freedom in refugee settlements; and lack of access to health and justice services in refugee settlements.

This study argues that what the survivors who participated in this research wanted was “viable justice”. That is justice that is survivor-centred and includes elements of traditional and transitional justice, underpinned by social justice. By including the voices of both men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and getting the views of service providers and other stakeholders, this paper offers an alternative form of justice to the internationally accepted types of justice, which offer little relevance or restitution to refugees, particularly where the crime has been committed in a different country and where there is little chance that perpetrators will be prosecuted in a formal court of law.

The research findings are based on a small sample of South Sudanese refugees living in three refugee settlements in Northern Uganda. Thus, wider conclusions should not be drawn. However, the research does suggest that a “viable justice” approach should be implemented that is gender and culturally sensitive and which could also be trialled in different refugee contexts.

Improvements in refugee survivors’ dignity, resilience and recovery are dependent upon the active engagement of refugees themselves using a “survivor-focussed approach” which combines formal and community-based health services with traditional and transitional justice responses.

The provision of a “viable justice approach” ensures those who have experienced SGBV and/or torture, and their families, feel validated. It will assist them to use their internal, cultural and traditional resilience and agency in the process of recovery.

The research findings are original in that data was collected from men and women survivors of SGBV and/or torture and service providers. The empirical evidence supports this study’s recommendation for an approach that combines both formal and survivor-focussed approaches towards health and viable justice services to meet the needs of refugees living in refugee settlements. This is a response that listens to and responds to the needs of refugee survivors in a way that continues to build their resilience and agency and restores their dignity.

Despite a global consensus that rule of law is desirable, there are important debates about what this entails and how it can be achieved or supported in developing and transitional countries of the Global South. Accordingly, this chapter considers the importance and contextual suitability of rule of law as a building block for ‘peaceful and inclusive societies’ in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). We begin by examining key definitional debates and consider the challenges inherent to monitoring progress towards SDG target 16.3 which seeks to ‘promote the rule of law at the national and international levels, and ensure equal access to justice for all’. We proceed to illustrate some of these definitional and methodological limitations by considering how favourable rankings of model Western democracies mask rule of law deficits that relate to access to justice and the protection of human rights for marginalised populations. This critique highlights an important point that is repeatedly emphasised throughout the rule of law literature: rule of law is not an end state but rather an ideal that all countries must continuously work to realise and sustain. The remainder of the chapter considers the challenges of promoting a Western rule of law agenda in a failed and titular democracy (the Solomon Islands) and a peaceful and prosperous country (Singapore) which adheres to a ‘thin’ definition of the rule of law that does not conform with liberal ideals.

Target 16.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) refers to the need for ‘responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making’ to facilitate just, peaceful and inclusive societies. This chapter discusses why it is important that security and justice institutions, and decision-making therein, are responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative; how to develop such institutions; and how to measure success in this regard. It is argued that the limited scope of the official SDG indicators used to measure progress risks action being taken on less tangible and less measurable but often more meaningful aspects of building just, peaceful and inclusive societies. The chapter argues that facilitating more inclusive decision-making, especially in the security and justice sector (redistributing power), and evaluating progress in this regard (determining what success looks like) are both highly political undertakings. These undertakings are thus, fraught with practical difficulties and likely to generate resistance from those who have a vested interest in retaining the status quo. Retaining focus on the Target and overarching Goal, however, can help avoid implementation being derailed by being distracted by a huge data gathering exercise to respond to a narrow set of quantifiable indicators. It can also ultimately help facilitate transformational change towards just, peaceful and inclusive societies.

This chapter critically analyzes the disparity between presumptive theoretical and technical development literatures and local ways of inhabiting gender and conceptualizing justice in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This study explores local understandings of sexual violence, gender, and justice to capture a picture of gender, victimhood, and agency that destabilizes hegemonic global narratives of widespread violence and oppression.

Dominant academic and policy literatures often rely on universalized framings of gender, sexual violence, and justice. Broader critiques of Western presuppositions regarding the lived realities of women’s experiences are necessary to bridge the gap between representation and reality.

Without understanding the lives and experiences of women like those in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, imported programs to improve women’s “access to justice” and to “empower” women fail to render an inclusive justice and, ironically, reinforce essentialized conceptions of gender that are themselves an obstacle to women’s empowerment.

The danger of perpetuating hollow myths of oppression and suffering necessitates a re-evaluation of how scholars and development professionals capture the complexity of gender, sexual violence, and conceptions of justice in Indonesia, as well as other countries in the Global South.

This study builds on existing critical literature to problematize global assumptions about sexual violence, and emphasizes how essentialized representations of the feminine as fixed and universally oppressed silence the myriad voices of women of Yogyakarta.