Access to Justice as a Human Right

In a recent blog post, Michael Wrase presents early findings from the Access to Justice research project that he is leading at the WZB. He argues "that a further development of the broader conceptual approach to access to justice is overdue – with regard to its (normative) human rights aspect as well as its empirical side."

He also calls for more empirical research on the "responsiveness" of the legal system, i.e. its effective capability to fulfil peoples' needs: "Individual (and also collective) rights which cannot be enforced in practice by those for whom they are intended are worthless."

Michael Wrase's blog post was published in Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies, the blog of the University of Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.