African Law for Everyone: AfricanLII and Laws.Africa Mariya Badeva-Bright · mariya@laws.africa · mariyab@africanlii.org · @mariyabb www.africanlii.org @africanlii www.laws.africa @laws_africa
Access to legal information = Access to justice No justice, when: ● Justice is delayed ● Justice is expensive ● Justice is corrupt
Access to legal information = access to justice • There is no reliable, consistent and up-to-date access to the law in many African countries (of the free or the paid kind)
Why? - Not economically viable for commercial publishers (until recently) - Small profession - Little external interest as economies were underdeveloped - State does not have funds and skills - Poor state of record keeping and archival - Low-level corruption
Open Infrastructure = open to anyone, offering speed, efficiency, services, growth and development
DECEMBER 2007 JULY 2019
HELPING EVERYONE ACCESS AFRICAN LAW
Subject Index African Commercial Law Index African Human RIghts Index Summarized and indexed by postgraduate students from the University of Cape Town
Visit: citator.africanlii.org
Are we helping Africans Access Justice? Collectively - close to 400,000 users per month; 90% from within Africa Lawyers, judges, magistrates, law students, government, CSOs, professionals, businesspeople, ordinary citizens Mostly urban, but with some significant “in-roads” in rural areas
‘In the communities, people are afraid of the village headmen and chiefs who have a lot of power. Thus, there is a need for equipping the communities with knowledge of rights, to secure their confidence in challenging some of the dictates of the local leaders. As traditional rulings have to be confirmed by the Magistrates, I need access to Magistrates' rulings in situations where there is contestation. ‘In the rural communities, I show people the physical copy of ZimLII cases, for example to show evidence of the recent child marriage legislation. Paralegals are generally equipped with knowledge about people’s rights, but they fall back on the latest case law.’ Jonathan Chikukwa, Zimbabwean Paralegal, 24 years in the field
Pocket Law Paralegals Facilitating access to legal information for paralegal advice offices in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. ● Pocket Law website ● Pocket Law USB stick (offline/on-line) ● Pocket Law Android App (offline/on-line)
Paralegal training in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Moderator speaks about the importance of access to information via Pocket Law Paralegals. This is one of two strategies of improving Access to Justice, says the paralegal.
In most African countries, there is no free source of consolidated, up-to-date legislation.
Access to the law promotes justice and an effjcient & efgective judiciary and legal sector.
Countries with better regulatory and enforcement systems have more developed credit markets, rank higher in overall development indices, and better facilitate the growth of small firms. World Bank. 2016. Doing Business 2016: Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency.
What does access to legislation look like in 2019?
Legislation.gov.uk is the authoritative source of all UK legislation.
Kenya Law is the authoritative source of all Kenyan legislation.
OpenBylaws.org.za improves access to South African by-laws
Laws.Africa An open source, cloud platform for efficient, cost-effective consolidation and publication of African legislation.
A little bit of history 2010 - AfricanLII founded to promote the role of LIIs in Africa 2013 - OpenBylaws.org.za launches to make by-laws easier to find, read and share. Jan 2015 - Indigo Trust awards a grant to AfricanLII to build a legislation consolidation platform. Sep 2015 - OpenBylaws.org.za moves to the Indigo Platform. Nov 2018 - Laws.Africa founded as a non-profit organisation. Jan 2019 - Laws.Africa begins work to make African legislation open and machine-friendly.
Use technology to reduce the cost and time required to consolidate legislation and make it available for free.
Help African nations to leapfrog into modern technology and deliver on their constitutional mandate to inform citizens of the laws that govern them – effjciently and cost-efgectively.
Crowdsource an open digital archive of gazettes and legislation to underpin the legislation collection.
Promote skills, capacity and knowledge in African governments that support ongoing, in-house maintenance of up-to-date legislation consolidations.
Make legislation available as a machine-friendly building block to unlock new value and opportunities in justice innovation.
Reviewers Contributors PDF ePUB Review Acts Gazettes Print Point in time Desktop Point in time Mobile Point in time Laws.Africa platform Research
What is Akoma Ntoso is an XML markup standard for legislative documents. Akoma Ntoso? It is a non-proprietary, open standard managed by OASIS. Captures rich metadata and structural information for legislation. Separates content and structure from presentation.
<section id="section-9"> <h3>9. The rescue of stray dogs</h3> <num>9.</num> <heading>The rescue of stray dogs</heading> <p> <paragraph id="section-9.paragraph-0"> A person who rescues a stray dog <content> shall report the date <p> and time of the rescue and a A person who rescues a stray dog description of the dog to the shall report the date and time of the Council within twenty four hours. rescue and a description of the dog </p> to the Council within twenty four hours. </p> </content> </paragraph> </section> Akoma Ntoso HTML
Publish instantly for web, mobile, PDF and print Mobile Print Presentation Web Structure Content
Web and mobile first Web access is cheaper, faster, easier to update and reaches more users ● First-class support for desktop, tablet and mobile users ● PDF and e-book formats for offline use ● Export to print for binding and archiving ●
Web and mobile PDF and ePub Rich interactivity Generated automatically ● ● Points in time Customised layout for local tradition ● ● Clickable links between Acts Clickable Tables of Contents ● ● Primary Acts and SIs Clickable links ● ● Inline definitions Collections and individual Acts ● ● Search Zero-touch reformatting ● ● Browse by subject area ● Browse by type (eg. Money bills) ● Multiple languages ● Links to gazettes ●
Skills & training for consolidation Training by Laws.Africa editors ● Build skills and reduce costs ● Faster results and outputs ● Full control of consolidation and review process ● Continuous, frequent updates to legislation ● Respond quickly to organisational changes and requirements ● Not dependant on third parties ● Fast-track high priority legislation ● Outsource (all or parts) if necessary ●
Support for collaboration Permissions and roles ● Flexible tasks and workflows ● Two-step review process ● Editorial sign-off on all changes before publishing ●
Secure Roles and permissions for editors and reviewers ● Audit trail for all changes ● Version history ● Compare and revert erroneous changes ● Two-step review process ● Changes only published after review and approval ●
Hosted in the Cloud Hosted on-site Secure Full control ● ● Reliable Simple to deploy ● ● Minimal IT admin Widely used & well ● ● Daily off-site backups documented technology ● Automatic updates Regular updates ● ● Monitoring and maintenance No proprietary licenses ● ● No proprietary licenses ●
No vendor lock-in Open source software, built in Africa ● Adaptable to local legal traditions, needs and processes ● Invest in local and African software developers ● Open standards (Akoma Ntoso XML legislative markup) ● Future-proof ●
Integrate with any platform through the Content API Work with your existing website (Drupal, WordPress, etc.) ● Use AfricanLII’s Drupal plugin ● Legislation in easy to use, embed-ready HTML ● Legislation in Akoma Ntoso XML for advanced use cases ● Automated Tables of Contents ● Amendments, points in time and multiple official translations ● Links to Gazettes ●
Gazette Machine: Gazettes as source material, provenance and verification
Gazette index Gazettes Legislation index Laws.Africa platform API End user sites (AfricanLii etc.)
“Can I trust this legislation?” Gazettes for provenance and verification ● Automated identification and archiving of gazettes ● Acts, commencements, amendments and repeals linked to source gazettes ● Editors and reviewers linked to the right gazette, when they need it ● Users can trace and verify source of information ●
Contributor community
Recommend
More recommend
