In May and June CILC paid a visit to Moscow and Yekaterinburg for a working meeting on legal aid provision and a roundtable on a survey on legal needs and access to justice.
On Monday May 30 the Russian Ministry of Justice in Moscow hosted a working meeting on legal aid and the informational and managerial systems that support legal aid provision in Russia and the Netherlands. CILC introduced Mr. Jan Albert Waal and Ms. Vivian Schrijber-Leloux, the chief executive officer and project manager of the Dutch Legal Service Counters to highlight the Dutch legal aid provision and the software solutions that support the work flow of the Legal Service Counters. Next to this presentation, Mr. Guido Schakenraad, a Dutch lawyer involved in legal aid delivery, and Mr. Rob Creusen, Project Manager at the Dutch Council for the Judiciary, spoke about the practice of legal aid provision by lawyers, and ways in which to raise the efficiency and quality of lawyers’ work.
Within the framework of this project the project team will try to streamline and standardize the work flow supporting systems in the Russian legal aid provision. Further steps in this regard will be taken during the study visit to the Netherlands of representatives of several Russian State Legal Bureaus that is to take place in September this year.
On June 1 CILC participated in a roundtable discussion in Yekaterinburg that focused on a survey on legal needs and access to justice, held in the Russian region of Sverdlovsk in March this year. At this meeting project expert Martin Gramatikov (University of Tilburg) held a presentation on comparative research into legal needs and access to justice of the past few years. In addition two social scientists of CILC’s project partner PILnet presented the preliminary findings of the survey, focusing on the nature of the legal problems Russian citizens face, the paths they use to solve them, and the perception of the solution or outcome of their legal problems.
Next steps in this particular project part are the perfection of the survey questionnaire for further use in various other regions in Russia, and the publication of the results of this specific survey in the Sverdlovsk region.