Reasoning a Human Right to Legal Aid

Abstract

Legal aid and human rights have more in common than is usually appreciated: both are concerned with guaranteeing equality and justice, and both are underpinned by respect for human dignity (Fleming 2007: 26; Luban 2005: 817 – 18, 839 – 40). But these shared characteristics are not usually the basis on which the relationship between legal aid and human rights has been explored; rather, the exercise in the literature is often to propose that one — legal aid — ought to be brought within the scope of the other — human rights (see, for example, J ü riloo 2015; Kyiv Declaration 2007). Legal aid advocates look to achieving human rights status as a way of entrenching legal aid, thereby guaranteeing its availability. Legal aid advocates want legal aid to be admitted into the international human rights regime, and they make their case not on the basis that legal aid and human rights are conceptual cousins, but in a rhetorical manner, on the basis that there is something essentially important about legal aid that means it should be accepted as a human right.