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	How Small Data can improve Access to Justice for the Poor by Matthew Burnett & Tom Walker Open Society Justice Initiative   How Small Data can improve Access to Justice for the Poor, by Matthew Burnett & Tom Walker.   A tenant becomes homeless because she or he doesn’t understand how to challenge a landlord’s eviction order. A farmer lacks the ability to prove the legal ownership of traditional lands. A young woman can’t get access to state sponsored medical care because she lacks the right documentation.   These are all examples of how barriers to justice are both a cause and a consequence of poverty and inequality. Without meaningful access to justice, people are more likely to face problems with health, employment, housing, and education.   These issues are at the heart of efforts by the Open Society Foundations and other partners to push the world’s governments to deliver on the promise made in the Sustainable Development Goals to deliver “equal access to justice for all.” But what does that look like? How do we measure it? And how do we know what works, and what doesn’t?   Thanks to the more than 50 large-scale legal needs surveys which have been conducted in over 30 countries, we now know more than ever about the prevalence of various legal problems, global inequalities in people’s experience of the law, common barriers to justice, and the social and economic costs of ineffective access to justice.   Most recently, the World Justice Project’s 2018 Global Insights on Access to Justice provided comparable data on legal needs and access to justice on a global scale. Identifying the need is one thing. But how do we create and sustain effective access to justice solutions?   For one thing, we need more and better “small data” from within justice systems. Small data is drawn from the experience of the user and offers an accessible way to understand and address specific problems. It includes, for example, the individual case data gathered by organizations serving poor and marginalized communities, which draws on the problems faced by real people.   When collected and analyzed, this data can help identify the problems that matter to a community. It can shape the best ways to address those problems, and it can help us assess the actual impact of a particular solution. Small data can also give us the information to persuade governments and private funders to invest in the provision of community-based justice systems by demonstrating how a low-cost solution can save money and, sometimes, prevent a costly crisis.   While it does not replace large-scale legal needs studies, collecting this data is less expensive because it is generated through the day-to-day provision of legal services. It also adds an important complementary picture; it reflects experiences navigating real-time legal processes, whereas surveys often rely on people’s recall or perceptions.   To explore this potential, the Open Society Justice Initiative and several of the Open Society national foundations teamed up with The Engine Room, an international organization that helps nonprofits make the most of data and technology, to research how organizations collect, manage, analyze, and share data on community-based justice provisions.   We also explored the role that case management technology plays in helping organizations to improve the quality of their advocacy and provide services to larger numbers of people in more effective and efficient ways. Our report explores the use and impact of technology in case management in Indonesia, Moldova, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, informed by interviews with a range of civil society organizations, technologists, and government representatives.   Here’s what we learned:   Frontline case data can help to identify, in a compelling way, problems that need fixing based on local priorities. In 2012 and 2013, for example, the South African organization Black Sash used case data from local Community Advice Offices to discover that money was systematically—and inappropriately—deducated from people’s government benefit payments. Using data from more than 120 cases, from across three provinces, Black Sash ran a campaign that successfully ended the practice.   Collecting more data on legal aid and community-based justice can demonstrate the scale and impact of access to justice interventions. For example, the National Legal Aid Council in Moldova recently introduced a system that will collect data on paralegals’ activities nationwide, helping to build the case for sustainable, long-term support.   It can also generate insights into complex issues by sharing data between organizations, as demonstrated by those organizations in the United Kingdom who collaborated to investigate common advice needs among homeless people.   Case data can demonstrate that community-based justice reduces public spending, by limiting the use of state resources. For example, a 2007–2010 analysis of 338 cases in Indonesia showed that paralegals in Indonesia often found alternative solutions that minimized the need to involve police, mediating between conflicting parties in 54 percent of cases reviewed.   The Open Society Foundations are currently working with organizations in South Africa and Sierra Leone to conduct further research into the economic benefits to government, and to make the case for expanded justice services.   Well-designed technology systems for collecting case data can make legal empowerment work more efficiently, reducing costs and time spent on administration. By replacing manual processes with a new case management system, Legal Aid South Africa reduced the number of managers required to process cases from 64 to five. Indonesia’s Ministry of Law and Human Rights has said that moving to an online system has doubled the amount of money successfully reimbursed to independent legal aid organizations nationwide.   Collecting data effectively and regularly can also make organizations more responsive. Organizations we spoke to in Sierra Leone were starting to use case data both to identify paralegals’ training needs, and to shed light on questions such as the proportion of people who access local courts rather than the formal justice system.   Our research suggests that harnessing the benefits of case management systems takes time and resources; careful attention to context; and thoughtful, sustained engagement on the needs of users. But it also highlights how “small data” can have a big impact. By bringing together experiences from a wide range of national contexts to identify useful strategies and approaches, the Open Society Foundations are aiming to contribute to this process. 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	The systemic marginalization of economic and social rights by Philip Alston UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty   August 2016   Conventional wisdom celebrates the great strides that have been made in recent years in relation to economic and social rights. The process of including those rights in constitutions has moved quickly in recent years. Courts in various countries have generated valuable case law, UN member states adopted a complaints mechanism (Optional Protocol) linked to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN has established several new mandates devoted to monitoring these rights. Indeed, international human rights bodies have devoted far more time to debating such rights than they once did.   In many respects, however, the approach currently taken by the international human rights system all but ensures the worst possible outcome. On the one hand, the correct approach insists that economic and social rights are indivisible from, and of equal importance to, civil and political rights, suggesting that they can provide a meaningful response to extreme poverty, extreme inequality and other forms of rampant social injustice.   On the other hand, the international human rights system systematically marginalizes those rights, and tolerates a situation in which the majority of states avoids proper recognition of these rights and fails also to hold anyone to account when they are routinely ignored.   Many of the states that enjoy the world’s highest living standards have specifically rejected proposals to recognize economic and social rights in legislative or constitutional form. But even in countries whose constitutions deem economic and social rights to be justiciable the courts resist or reject proposals to implement them.   Despite the fact that intergovernmental bodies and civil society actors, especially at the international level, are actively pumping out detailed and lengthy interpretations of economic and social rights provisions designed to help governments and other actors to better understand the nature and scope of the relevant obligations, there are very few meaningful responses from governments at the national level.   While greater attention to these rights can aid and empower civil society actors, they alone cannot bring about the deep societal change that is required if economic and social rights are to be taken seriously as human rights.   At the end of the day, the most telling evidence of the extent to which economic and social rights remain unacknowledged as human rights is the frequency with which debates about them slide imperceptibly and almost naturally into broad discussions of development. States challenged to explain how they respect economic and social rights will describe general development or social welfare initiatives as though they are necessarily synonymous with such rights. But development initiatives might not be rights-promoting or even rights-protecting. Even when they are, they may end up only promoting the special interests of a targeted group.   Treating economic and social rights as human rights rather than long-term goals introduces an element of immediate salience. The fact that governments and others avoid rights terminology so assiduously shows that the chosen terms do indeed matter and make a big difference.   First, the use of the human rights framework ensures that in programs designed to promote collective wellbeing, the rights of the individual are taken into account.   Second, in contrast to generic social justice language, human rights discourse directs policymakers and others back to the internationally agreed formulations of economic and social rights and the jurisprudence that has painstakingly evolved.   Third, treating economic and social rights as human rights rather than long-term goals introduces an element of immediate salience that might otherwise not be present.   Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the language of rights recognizes and insists on the dignity and agency of all individuals and it is intentionally empowering. The legal conception of human rights presupposes and demands accountability.   Of course, the past quarter of a century has seen a great number of important initiatives, especially in areas such as the right to housing, the right to food, the right to health and the right to water. But acceptance in law and in practice that economic and social rights are actually human rights, with the set of clear legal consequences that this entails, remains marginal.   The equal status of the rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects a hard-fought ideological and political compromise, not only between capitalist and communist approaches in the 1940s, but between continuing differences in perception over what societies should value most and the terms of the social contract between the state and its inhabitants.   It is the glue that has held the package together, enabling the reconciliation of otherwise starkly competing visions.   There is also the question of the legitimacy of the overall human rights enterprise. Critics increasingly portray the economic and social rights framework as being toothless and ineffectual and bringing small or no returns in terms of social justice. Closely linked to this loss of legitimacy is a loss of credibility in the eyes of rights holders.   The second-class status of economic and social rights has deeply negative consequences for the potential of the human rights movement to gain the widespread support that it needs.   The fact that the movement is subject to powerful challenges at the global level is due in significant part to the perception that its overriding preoccupations do little or nothing to address the most abiding and pressing challenges confronted by a large part of humanity.   With all this to consider, there are three key ingredients for adequate recognition and implementation of economic and social rights: (a) the need to accord legal recognition to the rights; (b) the need for appropriate institutional arrangements to promote and facilitate realization of the rights; and (c) the need for measures that promote governmental accountability. This can be termed the recognition, institutionalization and accountability framework, or the RIA framework.   It is difficult to understand how the obligations to “recognize” the rights, and to “guarantee” non-discrimination, could possibly be achieved in the absence of targeted legislative or equivalent measures, as many governments argue.   The key element here is the recognition of the norm itself, not merely the adoption of measures that are pertinent to the subject-matter of the norm. Where no institutions are designated to take the lead in implementing a particular human right, the likelihood is that little will be done to treat it as a human right per se.   A conception of human rights that implicitly accepts a radical hierarchical distinction between the two sets of rights is one that is fundamentally incompatible with international human rights law.   Just as importantly, it offers no solution to the increasingly urgent challenges posed by radical and growing inequality and widespread material deprivation in a world of plenty.   The reality is that governments have not accidentally overlooked the significance of the recognition, institutionalization and accountability (RIA) framework. On the contrary, the widespread failure to ensure that these three building blocks are in place in relation to economic and social rights is the principal symptom of the resistance.   Proponents of economic and social rights need to acknowledge and tackle this deeper political reality rather than sailing merrily along as though there is widespread and basic agreement on economic and social rights.   * Philip Alston is a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law, co-Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. His report on these issues was presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June, 2016, see link below.   * Is the Universal Periodic Review mechanism of the UN Human Rights Council living up to its potential to advance economic, social and cultural rights? This question is at the heart of research recently completed by the Center for Economic and Social Rights and the Sciences Po Law School Clinic: http://bit.ly/2eg7lIa Visit the related web page
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