Access to Justice

The concept "Access to Justice", which came to the fore in especially 1960s in association with the development of social state concept at some extent, has become one of the building blocks of the concept of supremacy of law

When it is thought that plea is one of the important actors in Access to Justice, the importance of improvement of law education and its quality, adoption of right based approach of the trainee education to all education/course fields and also improvement of professional experience of lawyers emerge ipso facto. Within this scope, RWİstanbul has determined training activities for lawyers and legal trainees as one of its working areas.

Moot Court can be identified as a learning method which is based on role plays where the law faculty students take roles of prosecution and defense as part of their faculty education. RWİstanbul in collaboration with Law Faculty of Bahçeşehir University and Raoul Wallenberg Institute allied with Law Faculty of Sweden Lund University organizes moot court event open to all law students in Turkey.

In addition to planning and conducting Access to Justice based clinical legal education and forming national and international collaborations in this field, RWİstanbul aims for the improvement of law faculty students and academic members on pedagogic and educational level. Said legal clinics, among its objectives and outcomes, as much as improving experimental learning methods of students, contribute to law faculty curricula to have the decent quality to improve Access to justice.

Organizing trainings targeting the improvement of the quality of the lodges made with European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court for legal practitioners and lawyers pursuing their careers in collaboration with Constitutional Courts, European Courts of Human Rights, Bar Associations and Universities in order to ensure the correct and effective use of the application means which are defined within the scope of both national and international law and within the framework of access to justice rights that serve as effective and appropriate complaint mechanisms against human rights violations is one of the many areas that RWIstanbul puts in special effort.

Another feature of the concept of Access to Justice directly involves is enabling access to justice for every single person.

Apart from the activities related to Access to justice, RWIstanbul carries out actions and activities aimed for the empowerment of the disadvantaged groups as the subject of the rights via increasing the awareness based on human rights.

This approach is based on the fact that the difficulties faced in relation with Access to justice is not only because of the faults in formal legal mechanisms but also, possibly more, is based on inequalities that emerge while accessing to public services such as education and social resources.

At the top of the list of these inequalities are “being women”, “poverty”, “physical, mental disorders/disabilities”, “being a refugee”, “age (being young or elderly)”, “ethnicity”, “religion, and sect differences”, “language”, “different sexual orientations”.

Activities aimed for the legal empowerment of right owners in order to eliminate the structural and historical obstacles that cause this kind of inequality situations which exist in almost all societies in the world on different levels must be considered as an effort to enable access to justice.

Access to Justice of the refugees and people with disabilities is the top priority for RWIstanbul.

Within this scope, RWIstanbul carries out national and international meetings and education organizations by collaborating with the relevant departments of bar associations, NGOs, universities, and academics.