Indigenous Access to Justice in Civil Law Matters

Funding or Partner Organisation: Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Projects)

Start year: 2017

Summary: This project aims to enhance Indigenous access to justice in civil and family law through analysis of Indigenous understandings of and demands for justice. It has both policy-oriented and theoretical objectives, directed towards change in both the academic and policy spheres. Current conceptualisations of access to justice are limited by a focus on non-Indigenous legal remedies and enhancing access to existing legal processes. Indigenous Australians’ perspectives on what constitutes effective access to civil/family law justice are largely excluded from these conceptualisations and policy prescriptions. For instance, large-scale access to justice studies have generally given little attention to Indigenous perspectives in their methodology and findings. This project will contribute significantly to a new understanding of Indigenous access to justice and to the development of new policy directions for the introduction of quality innovative civil and family law justice initiatives. Crucially, the research will put Indigenous voices at the heart of these new conceptualisation of access to justice. Without this level of Indigenous input, there is a danger that structural barriers to access to justice are reproduced and mistrust of the law by Indigenous communities is perpetuated. The research will focus on Indigenous access to justice in five priority areas of civil/family legal need: housing and tenancy; discrimination; social security, child protection; and credit, debt and related consumer matters.

FOR Codes: Access to Justice, Civil Law and Procedure, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Law, Law Reform, Civil Justice, Legal Processes, Civil procedure, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the law