The National Legal Services Authority of India (NALSA) with support from the Government of India and in collaboration with the International Legal Foundation (ILF), the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will host the First Regional Conference on Access to Legal Aid at New Delhi, India on 27 & 28 November, 2023.
The conference will bring together Chief Justices, Ministers of Justice, legal aid officers, policymakers, and civil society experts from 70 Africa-Asia-Pacific countries of the Global South to discuss the challenges and opportunities in ensuring access to quality legal aid services for the poor and vulnerable. The conference will also provide a platform for sharing best practices and identifying innovative solutions to improve access to justice in the participating countries.
More than 200 delegates will participate in the two-day Conference including Hon’ble Chief Justices of Bangladesh, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Maldives, Mauritius, Mongolia, Nepal, Zimbabwe and the Hon’ble Minister of Justices from Kazakhstan, Nepal, Palau, Seychelles, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Zambia.
Shri Jagdeep Dhankhar, Hon’ble Vice President of India will grace the inaugural session on 27 November, 2023 which will be presided by Dr. Justice Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud, Hon’ble
Chief Justice of India & Patron-in-Chief, NALSA, in the august presence of Hon’ble Mr. Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Judge, Supreme Court of India & Executive Chairman, NALSA; Hon’ble Mr. Justice Sanjiv Khanna, Judge, Supreme Court of India & Chairman, SCLSC; Shri Arjun Ram Meghwal, Minister of State, Ministry of Law & Justice (Independent Charge); Shri R. Venkataramani, Attorney General for India and Shri Amitabh Kant, India’s G20 Sherpa and former CEO, NITI Aayog.
Smt. Droupadi Murmu, Hon’ble President of India will bestow her distinguished presence at the Valedictory session of the Conference on 28 November, 2023. The Hon’ble President of
India will be joined by Hon’ble Chief Justice of India along with Hon’ble Mr. Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Hon’ble Mr. Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Hon’ble Law Minister Shri Arjun Ram Meghwal on the dais.
The Conference includes a Chief Justices Roundtable on ‘Ensuring Equal Access to Justice for All in the Global South’ and a Ministerial Roundtable on ‘Advancing the 2030 Agenda on
Sustainable Development: Access to Justice - Global South’. There will be three Plenary sessions and ten Parallel technical sessions.
The keys areas for deliberations include developing effective examples of people-centric justice systems, measuring quality of legal aid services, strategies for reducing pre-trial detention, early access to legal aid in criminal cases, legal aid in civil cases, sustainable funding mechanisms, child friendly legal aid, etc.
This Regional Conference follows a call made by the participants of the 2nd International Conference on Legal Aid in Criminal Justice Systems held in Argentina in 2016 for conferences to be organised at the regional level.
The Conference will pioneer the principle of equal access to justice for all, and highlight regional efforts to implement the United Nations Principles and Guidelines on Access to Legal Aid in Criminal Justice Systems 2012 and to further the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals. It would reaffirm the critical role of judiciary in ensuring access to legal representation and government’s commitment to providing state funded legal aid services. The focus will be on strengthening the frameworks on access to justice in the Global South.
This Conference will showcase India’s ‘Access to Justice’ framework which is one of the most developed in the world in terms of guaranteeing vast coverage of the population, promising
universal access to legal aid for all forms of judicial and quasi-judicial legal processes and for advancing ‘Ease of Justice’.
It is a first of its kind platform where the leaders of the two pillars of democracy – legislature and judiciary, will come together to accelerate the progress towards Sustainable Development
Goals. This will be a great leap from the previous international conferences on this subject matter where the Governments and Judicial organs have not participated.
Venue: Additional Supreme Court Complex, Supreme Court of India, New Delhi, India Date: November 27-28, 2023 For more information, please contact: Ms. Madhurima Dhanuka, Research Consultant, NALSA at +91-97489-27001.
