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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