BREAKtheBIAS: For Equal Access to Human Rights Justice

This project seeks to address one of the most challenging problems in the international human rights system - that of unequal access to human rights justice. It looks at the outcomes of 100,000 international, regional, and domestic human rights cases and identifies who is able to turn to human rights bodies and which individuals and groups are unsuccessful in making their claims.

By identifying barriers that restrict access and examining the role of international lawyers in the process, the project makes a significant advance in the study of inequities in international law. It builds on insights from social psychologists and behavioural economists to introduce a pioneering new framework through which the existence and operation of bias against human rights victims can be analysed systematically.

By looking at implicit, geographical, and structural legal bias, the project aims to understand the cause of access disparities so that legal processes and existing structures can be redesigned to ensure equal access to human rights justice for everyone.

The project adopts a highly original mixed-methods approach. It builds on a large dataset of the case law of fifteen human rights bodies and more than 300 interviews in ten jurisdictions to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse how victims' characteristics influence the success of their human rights claims. For the first time in human rights, it marries in-person experiments with computer simulation to understand the dynamics of access to justice and to discover how new international rules and other bias-mitigating interventions could be used to break the bias.

The findings of the project will make an important contribution to several academic fields, shining a new light on how we understand and study access to justice, whilst the solutions proposed can importantly help international courts and tribunals impart equal justice for all.