Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has launched a worldwide hub for developing AI and new technologiesto help women and girls access justice more easily.
The initiative was praised as having the potential to transform lives around the world, making it “no longer the preserve” of the rich or those lucky enough to have lawyers who can afford to represent them for free, at its launch on Monday night.
The Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice, a partnership with the university’s Blavatnik School of Government with the Clooney Foundation for Justice, will be dedicated to harnessing the power of AI on the issue worldwide.
Among its aims, the institute will scale up the provision of free legal information digitally, look at how digital evidence can be preserved and present and promote international law, including developing guidance on how to bring AI into legal systems.
Speaking at the launch alongside Ms Clooney, the attorney general Lord Hermer described it as an “unprecedented opportunity”.
Human rights lawyer Ms Clooney, who is married to Hollywood star George Clooney, worked with Lord Hermer on a number of cases before he entered politics last year, when Sir Keir Starmer brought him into his cabinet.
Appearing on a panel beside Ms Clooney and Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, Lord Hermer KC said: “The use of AI and technology offers an unprecedented opportunity to meaningfully expand access to justice to women like those we represented. It means that access to justice may no longer be the preserve of those who can afford to pay lawyers or find lawyers who can afford to represent them for nothing. The potential for empowerment is unlimited – and that is one of the things that makes the creation of this Institute so inspiring and so exciting.”
He said the importance of using law to give voice to such victims was driven home to him by a case he litigated with Ms Clooney.
“It was a claim brought by women working on a farm in rural Malawi – one of the most beautiful but poorest countries on the planet,” he said.
“Women on that farm had suffered from systemic sexual violence, harassment and were placed in the lowliest of positions. This is the type of experience of women not only across Malawi but across so many parts of the world. We were able to obtain a fantastic outcome for our clients – compensation, the creation of a women’s health centre, the introduction of a female empowerment programme – all wonderful things but only helping a tiny fraction of victims – across the planet there will be hundreds of thousands of women facing similar plights with no means of meaningful legal protection.
“I am immensely proud that much the important work of the Institute will be centred here in the United Kingdom – for an institute that is seeking to harness the benefits of emerging technology and science for the benefit of the vulnerable, this is the perfect forum. It marries two great national traditions – the advancement of science and the development of international law and justice.”
According to data from the World Justice Project collated across 45 countries in 2017, 53 per cent of women reported experiencing a legal problem over a two-year period – however, only 13 per cent turned to an authority or third party to help resolve the problem.
Of women who reported having a legal problem, 42 per cent experienced a hardship as a result of the issue they were facing.
