2019 International Legal Aid Group Meeting in Ottawa
Ab Currie, Ph.D.Tuesday, July 9, 2019
The semi-annual meeting of the International Legal Aid Group (ILAG) was held in Ottawa in June from June 17 to 19, 2019. ILAG conferences are held every two years in a different country. The last time that an ILAG conference was held in Canada was in 1999 in Vancouver. This conference was hosted by Legal Aid Ontario which did an outstanding job of organizing the local events and venues, including a visit to the Supreme Court and the main conference dinner at the Museum of History.
A number of sessions contributed to the overall theme of the conference, Legal Aid as a Public Service: Is it Achievable? These included highly informative presentations about the use of technology in achieving access to justice, quality assurance in the delivery of legal services and assisting unrepresented litigants. In particular, a session on exploring gaps in the provision of services to vulnerable people highlighted the enormous scale and the creative strategies in bringing access to justice to the population of India.
There was substantial involvement by Canadian presenters. Catherine Coulter from Denton spoke about pro bono legal services in Ontario and, in the same session, Trevor Farrow from the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice spoke about professional ethics and obligations involved in access to justice and the public interest. David McKillop talked about on-going efforts at Legal Aid Ontario to meet the needs of diverse groups. Nick Summers from Newfoundland and Megan Longley from Nova Scotia gave a presentation illustrating the diversity of legal aid provision in Canada. In the same session, Karen Wilford from the NWT talked about the how the geographic and environmental factors combine with the legacy of colonialism shape the delivery of legal aid in Canada’s arctic region. Michele Leering from the Community Advocacy and Legal Centre in eastern Ontario spoke about a project currently underway in that province to advance health-justice partnerships in Ontario in a session that also included presentations about similar developments in Australia and the UK. In another session on technology and access Sherry MacLennan from the Legal Services Society of B.C. spoke about impressive developments in on-line dispute resolution for marginalized people in British Columbia. Nye Thomas and Ryan Fritch from the Law Commission of Ontario spoke about the potential impact of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making on access to justice.
In all the conference included 29 presentations in 9 sessions plus national reports. These will be available on the ILAG web site, along with papers from the previous ILAG conference held in South Africa, the ILAG Newsletter and articles about developments in legal aid. Readers are encouraged to access the ILAG web site at www.internationallegalaidgroup.org/ The International Legal Aid Group held its first meeting in the Netherlands 1994. It is the oldest international organization addressing legal aid and, more broadly, access to justice issues. ILAG remains the pre-eminent organization of academics, researchers and policy makers dedicated to sharing information about legal aid. It continues expand its international reach as the global access to justice landscape changes and is a source of valuable information and perspective on access to justice issues.