Substantive Justice Delivery Through Radical Legal Tech

Arguably, the current socio-economic system enables individuals or organisations with greater, financial or knowledge, resources to achieve a better level of legal advocacy. TSHR aims to address this problem by creating tools that allow individuals without such resources to better advocate for themselves and for organisations to streamline their research process in order to focus more on substantive aspects of a matter.

Our Approach

• Human-Centered Design & Accessibility: We design tools that make legal resources accessible and understandable for diverse users, including those with limited literacy or technical skills. Through features like automated decision trees, chatbots, and multilingual support, we help users navigate legal rights independently.

• Culturally Sensitive Design: TSHR tools are developed with cultural awareness, particularly for marginalized communities, ensuring relevance and usability in underserved contexts.

• Privacy by Design: We are committed to user privacy, creating tools that don’t collect or store data, enabling secure, independent access.

• Community Led: Our tools are informed and shaped by direct input from communities and organizations, ensuring practical, impactful, and user-focused solutions.

• Consistent Philosophical Lens: TSHR integrates the decolonial jurisprudential philosophy of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) into the design of all its tools. This approach ensures our tools are sensitive to the historical and structural inequalities often overlooked in mainstream legal frameworks and human rights tools, making them more accessible and relevant to marginalized communities.

Examples

• Accessible Legal Databases: My Rights helps users navigate complex legal information from the European Court of Human Rights. It combines automated web scraping, regular expression analysis, and semantic search to make judgments more accessible, helping both experts and everyday users understand their rights without needing costly legal advice.

• Automatic Citizenship Determination: In Myanmar, TSHR developed a Facebook chatbot in English and Rohingya to guide stateless individuals through citizenship eligibility. By answering simple yes/no questions, users learn their status and gain access to further information, even without formal literacy. An infographic version, distributed by the UNHCR, extends this tool’s reach to marginalized communities.

• Police Accountability Tool: Know Your Rights is a mobile app that educates users on their rights when interacting with police, specifically for stop-and-search situations. Designed to reduce racial profiling impacts, it provides accessible, situation-based legal guidance and includes an audio recording feature for documenting interactions. All information is stored locally for user privacy.

• Refugee Visa Form Filler: The Refugee Application tool assists asylum seekers in completing Australia’s lengthy, complex visa form. By providing multilingual support, built-in legal guidance, and question logic to streamline responses, this app enables individuals to complete the form independently, reducing the administrative burden on advocacy organizations and empowering users over their own application process.