SDG 16 focuses heavily on institutions and places the onus on people to navigate them. In reality, institutions are reactive; access to justice depends on user knowledge which once built and established creates confidence and agency. While there is sufficient investment in institutional reform, there remains a critical need to provide people accurate, credible legal information at scale.

Legal literacy has been the missing connective tissue across all SDG 16 targets. The idea of building a shared, public legal knowledge base empowers users before they reach authorities, lawyers or courts. Legal knowledge is vast and currently remains inaccessible due to language barriers, availability, costs, etc. Therefore, there is a need to reframe legal literacy as infrastructure, not just “awareness”.

Governance and implementation questions arise about: quality, credibility, integrity, accuracy, accountability, lawyer involvement, and localisation i.e. the problem of aggregating legal knowledge across legal spectrums, jurisdictions, organisations, formats, sectors, etc.

This session will guide the participants to understand that the foundational layer of access to justice is access to the “knowledge of law”; simplifying the life of a citizen by improving access to and quality of legal information.

Abhishikta Mallick

Programmes Lead, Jann 16 Foundation

Avanti Durani

Executive Director, Jann 16 Foundation

Brinda G. Lashkari

Projects Lead, Jann 16 Foundation

Joanita Britto Menon

Senior Legal Programme Manager Asia, TrustLaw, Thomson Reuters Foundation