The legal initiative was based on the joint work done with experts from the EUROsociAL+ Programme, amongst other things.
Photo: Ministry of Justice and Human Rights
On 3 January, the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, the Minister of the Interior, Rodrigo Delgado and the Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Hernán Larraín, presented the bill that creates the New National Service for Access to Justice and the Crime Victims Ombudsman.
This project seeks to create a new institutional framework to strengthen the right of access to justice, through the implementation of different lines of action with the aim of establishing a service which people find efficient, accessible and comprehensive.
The legal initiative was based on the joint work done with experts from the EUROsociAL+ Programme of the European Union, amongst other things, who together with a ministerial team prepared a diagnosis of access to justice in Chile, whose validation workshop was held in the middle of last November.
In this regard, Minister Hernán Larraín highlighted that, “the presentation of this project allows us to comply with one of the commitments of the Government’s Social Agenda, which is to guarantee and strengthen access to justice for all people, without distinction, with better justice focused on citizens’ legal needs. This new institutional framework will have a series of lines of action. On the one hand, it integrates the range of programmes offered by the Judicial Assistance Corporations with the defence of victims of crime, and includes specialised programmes, such as the My Lawyer Programme and the Ombudsman for the Elderly and a line of action in the field of Human Rights.”
In the same sense, he emphasised that “one of the lessons learnt from 2020 is the urgency of connecting people with justice, facilitating access to justice, which is nothing more than providing the means so that people can resolve their legal issues and conflicts, which means providing advice, defence and legal representation so that people know what their rights are, how to exercise them and appeal using the mechanisms to resolve them, which may be the courts, but also others such as mediation.”
This project makes it possible to create a single institutional structure that standardises and professionalises the care, orientation and legal representation of people, especially the most vulnerable in workplace, family, civil and criminal environments.
In this context, assistance is also planned for the programme to generate the guiding methodology to prepare the State of Chile’s first Access to Justice Plan on the part of the National Council, which is provided for in the initiative, pending this instrument enabling linkage and coordination for public and private actors that are part of the access to justice system, which positions the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights as the technical and political reference responsible for the conduct and monitoring of the Plan.
For Chile, this advancement represents the most significant modernisation in the last 50 years in terms of Access to Justice.
