On rebuilding trust in justice institutions through innovation, evidence and meaningful citizen participation — delivered at The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law.
Protocols. I would like to thank Mr. Jude Ilo, CEO of The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law, and his team for the very kind invitation to participate in this timely conversation on why justice matters, and for their generous hospitality since we arrived here in The Hague.
Let me begin with an obvious fact: the cost of lack of access to justice is staggering — and it is borne, not in courts or legal textbooks, but in the lived realities of ordinary people across our societies. Millions of people, especially in developing countries, live outside the protection of the law. Their land is taken, their wages withheld, their rights violated — yet they have no meaningful recourse. Their silence may not make headlines, but the cost of their exclusion is felt in every sector of our society. The economic cost is immense. When contracts are not enforced and informal traders and micro-entrepreneurs operate in fear of extortion or seizure of goods by government officials, local investment shrinks and poverty becomes permanent. The social cost is visible when people turn to violence or vigilante justice because they have no access to functioning, credible institutions. The gendered cost is profound — when women who report abuse, or widows claiming inheritance, are met with bureaucracy or indifference, inequality becomes institutionalized. And the political cost is dangerous. When justice appears to serve only the powerful, democracy becomes fragile, and citizen engagement withers. But above all, there is a moral cost — a quiet and corrosive erosion of human dignity. To be denied justice is to be told that your pain is irrelevant, your rights are conditional, your existence negotiable.
During my tenure as Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice of Lagos State — Nigeria’s commercial centre and its most populous city — we confronted these challenges head-on with a comprehensive reform agenda developed with several civil society organizations in the justice and governance sectors and with the Nigerian Bar Association. We realized in more specific terms that the lack of, or poor, access to justice conceals several terrible hidden costs. While the State provided the Directorate of Public Prosecutions, the vast majority of accused persons charged before the courts simply could not afford the cost of legal representation. Even before being charged to court they had had no legal representation at the point of arrest and interrogation, and many were in court having made admissions or confessions they would claim were induced. It became obvious that government had to provide legal assistance. We created the Office of the Public Defender, a unit in the newly created Department of Citizens’ Rights, which deployed lawyers for the legal defence of indigent accused persons. Later a Duty Solicitors Scheme was established in collaboration with civil society groups — lawyers who made the rounds in police stations and detention centres to assist arrested and detained persons.
A major issue was determining who was indigent. We did not set a predetermined threshold, which gave us flexibility. A bigger problem was legal assistance to indigent litigants in civil cases, which far outnumbered criminal cases — thousands of tenants evicted without due process, inheritance and succession claims from widows overpowered by relatives of deceased husbands, and victims of medical negligence for whom litigation was simply unaffordable. A common tactic was to take an indigent person to court knowing they could not afford long-drawn litigation, forcing them to abandon their claims. In response, we expanded the mandate of the public defenders to include all civil cases, enabling the State to support indigent litigants in establishing claims against individuals, corporations and even government.
We also established Citizens’ Mediation Centres to make mediation accessible to all, especially for small claims. At the end of a successful mediation a binding, enforceable agreement is signed by the parties. In one year we resolved over 8,000 landlord-and-tenant cases where magistrate courts were barely able to complete 2,000; since then the centres have been resolving over 20,000 cases yearly, free of charge, across some eighteen centres. We upgraded infrastructure, digitized court systems, improved case management, improved conditions of service for judicial officers, and worked hard to reduce delays.
These efforts led to measurable improvements. Court efficiency increased, more people accessed legal aid, and a culture of rights awareness began to grow. Lagos became a national model for justice sector reform. And yet a disquieting realization set in: we were improving the system, but the system itself was not designed to meet the justice needs of the majority. Our reforms, while progressive, were still rooted in an orthodox, institution-centred framework. They improved what existed — but they could not fully reach the vast populations living in informal settlements, working in the shadows of the economy, or navigating customary systems far removed from the courthouse.
My tenure as Attorney General ended in 2007. In 2008 the groundbreaking report “Making the Law Work for Everyone” by the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, funded by the UNDP, was published. It highlighted what we all suspected — the exclusion of billions from the rule of law and substantial justice. In response, the report proposed four pillars for legal empowerment of the poor: access to justice and the rule of law, property rights, labour rights and business rights. This was the birth of the People-Centred Justice approach to the conceptualization and delivery of justice.
The People-Centred Justice approach represents a fundamental shift in how justice is understood and delivered. Rather than focusing on formal legal institutions, it starts with people’s real-life needs — especially those of marginalized communities. Its most radical feature is the reframing of justice as a public service that, much like health or education, must be available, accessible, affordable and effective. Justice as a service is delivered through diverse, community-based platforms like mobile courts and legal clinics, not just formal courts. It is problem-solving, demand-driven, and builds synergy between formal and informal systems while aligning them with human rights. It promotes legal education and early intervention, uses evidence to design responsive solutions, and encourages inclusive, community-led governance of justice reform.
Permit me to conclude with a few learnings. The first is that only a people-centred system of development can give rise to a truly people-centred system of justice — a paradigm that places the needs and voices of the vast majority at the core of policy and planning, shifting from trickle-down orthodoxies to bottom-up, inclusive strategies that invest directly in the well-being of the poor majority. The second is that a people-centred justice model isn’t just about improving access to the law — it is about transforming the relationship between people and power. It seeks to build justice systems that are trusted, understood and used, especially by those who need them most. It replaces silence with voice, invisibility with inclusion, and exclusion with fairness. This is the future of justice, because it speaks to the needs of the largest numbers: it is practical, responsive and fundamentally just.
Originally published on justiceresearchinstitute.org.
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