Draft:People-centered Justice

People-centered justice is a way to organize justice services and the justice system in the broadest sense of the word, around the aspiration that justice should be equally accessible and effective for all people, enabling them to resolve justice problems, address injustices, stand up for their rights, resolve disputes effectively and access the services that they are entitled to. It focuses on the most common justice problems that people face and what works to resolve them and it recognizes that justice systems are not delivering for the vast majority of people.

The approach recognizes that an inclusive and effective justice sector is a pre-condition to the achievement of many other societal goals, including the other goals set out in the UN's 2030 Agenda.

Origin and context
People-centered justice has been used sporadically in academic work, for example 2011 in a study on the Justice Sector in Singapore and in 2012 in a book review. It is unclear who first coined the term, but the adjective "people-centered" has been used in other contexts including, people-centered development, people-centered health systems and people-centered design. The concept of people-centered justice is closely related to the idea of legal empowerment and this understanding builds on the work of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor which concluded in 2009.

The concept of people-centered justice gained prominence in the context of global debates on the rule of law and access to justice, inspired by the adoption of SDG 16, which has at its heart the global goal to provide access to justice for all by 2030. In that context a global Task Force on Justice worked to set out an agenda for the achievement of the goal of providing equal access to justice for all. From 2018 onward, the OECD policy round table on access to justice, and its corresponding workstream, was focused on people-centered justice.

People-centered justice as an approach emerged in response to the empirical reality that most justice systems around the world provide justice for the few, not justice for all. At the global level, this gap between the justice people want and need, and the justice they receive is conceptualized as the Global Justice Gap.

There are explicit linkages between people-centered justice and human rights. The effective realization of human rights and the prevention of human rights violations large and small, are intrinsic to people-centered justice: it emphasizes individuals as rights-holders and recognizes that equal access to justice is critical to sustainable development and peaceful societies.

The principles of people-centered justice
A series of international declarations, agreements and statements have recognized five central principles of people-centered justice:


 * 1) Put people and their justice needs at the center of justice systems
 * 2) Resolve justice problems
 * 3) Improve the quality of people’s justice journeys
 * 4) Use justice for prevention
 * 5) Provide people with means to access services and opportunities