Access to Justice through Human Centered Design Tech
08-16, 17:30–17:50 (Europe/Berlin), Bits & Bäume
Language: English

A significant minority is entitled to legal aid, the majority of the population’s disposable income is low, legal fees are incredibly expensive, human rights are constantly violated, many individuals struggle to meaningfully access justice or assert their rights. This talk will explore how technology can address these problems when created with human centred design principles and with the intent of empowering individuals. Topics explored will be police accountability, refugee visa applications, and legal violation prediction.


Content Notes

This talk will cover specific human rights issues while highlighting structural legal issues, how they have been addressed in methods not previously utilised.

The topics will include:

Police Accountability: addressed through recording and the provision of meaningful legal information

Refugee/Humanitarian Visa Applications: the complicated relationship that exists when providing legal advice

The general complexity of the law: how design and NLP can make inroads into tackling this structural issue, specifically focusing on alternative information provision and multilabel classification as a method of legal violation prediction.

Viraaj Akuthota is the founder and director of Technology Solutions for Human Rights. He is an international and domestic human rights lawyer, refugee lawyer, and social entrepreneur with a strong background in humanitarian work, technology, and the law.

His human rights experience has been established by working in remote communities of Australia, conflict settings in Myanmar, local free legal advice centers, and being responsible for the creation of legal arguments that are currently being litigated against the Australian government and large corporations at the highest courts within Australia.

The funded prototype fund project is My-Rights.info, a project that applies human centered design principles to accessing the European Court of Human Rights case law.

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