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Making justice more accessible

Published: 27 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

From the point of view of the Citizen, Justice is not always readily accessible. Either because it is a lengthy process, potentially expensive, sometimes unclear or simply scary, people will often avoid or withdraw from a judicial process, especially in those cases that involve relatively small amounts. This results in the giving up of a basic right, with the potential loss of rightful benefits. In this paper we briefly analyze the main aspects that impair access to Justice nowadays. We then move on to look at recent technological developments in the field of Online Dispute Resolution to argue that these can, in the near future, have a significant role in improving access to Justice. Specifically, we analyze the UMCourt Conflict Resolution Framework, developed by our research team, and address the different dimensions in which such tools contribute to make Justice more accessible, namely through better access to useful information, support in decision-making or more cost-effective processes.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ICEGOV '14: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
October 2014
563 pages
ISBN:9781605586113
DOI:10.1145/2691195
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

  • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt: Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Government
  • Municipio de Guimarães: Municipio de Guimarães

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 October 2014

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. citizen empowerment
  3. online dispute resolution

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • National Funds through the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology)
  • ERDF - European Regional Development Fund

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ICEGOV2014
Sponsor:
  • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt
  • Municipio de Guimarães

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ICEGOV '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 73 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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