This article outlines the need in the Netherlands for socially effective justice that better resolves citizens’ problems. The author argues that new forms of dispute resolution should be integrated in the justice system. The author first describes various types of innovations. Then he outlines the obstacles to innovations. A major obstacle is that many stakeholders in the existing legal system are simultaneously the gatekeepers for the admission of innovations. It is necessary to create an infrastructure that welcomes, reinforces, tests, finances and imports new treatments for legal problems.

In Dutch courts several pilots are being carried out in order to enhance the quality of civil procedure. The main focus of the pilots is to speed up the procedure and make it more cost-effective, while ensuring the procedure is easily accessible and is overseen by a mediating judge in a nearby court. This focus largely corresponds with aspects of the civil procedure that the courts and the minister of Justice have identified as in need of attention. The courts and the minister have focused on different specific problems and propose different solutions, however, and neither aims to address the quality of civil procedure as a whole. It is doubtful whether the proposals for improvement, put forward by the courts and the minister, can address the concerns they have intended to resolve and whether the overall quality of the civil procedure (for all civil cases instead of the simple ones) will be improved. Solutions to the problems of the civil procedure cannot be devised without first developing a clear picture of the problems people experience with civil procedures and the courts.

This article relates the geographical allocation of Courts to access to justice. Travel distances within the Dutch system are higher than in surrounding countries, but still not extremely high. The scale of the Dutch Court organizations however, is extreme. On average, a Court location that handles small claims has jurisdiction over a territory with over half a million inhabitants. This large number of inhabitants automatically translates to large numbers of cases, and large bureaucracies, employing 500 to 1,000 people (judges, court staff, support) each. Do travel distances to the Courts actually have an impact on the use of the Court system? Two recent studies find no support for a popular belief that defendants will be less determined to defend themselves when the travel distance to the court is longer. They do show however that the number of cases brought to Court by local plaintiffs drops when ‘their’ local court closes down.

A characteristic difference between administration of justice and mediation so far was the element of voluntariness on the side of the clients. Administration of justice however is, for the citizen who is brought before the courts, not voluntary. Recently pilots have been started in which citizens can turn voluntarily to the Court at low cost, and not far from their neighborhood. Judges will not primarily aim at making a decision in accordance with the law, but at finding friendly solutions. Does this mean that judges are going to mediate? And if so, how should this be appreciated? In this contribution attention is paid to certain aspects of this question. It is argued that differences between jurisdiction and mediation still remain. More than mediators judges must act within the legal framework. The extent to which they can engage in the emotional undercurrent of conflicts is limited. Confidence in the Court is from a different origin than trust in the mediator, and that also makes a difference. And finally, a judge is competent to make a binding judgment, which influences the way he or she is looked at by the parties.

Tot 1 juni lag een wetsvoorstel Experimentenwet rechtspleging ter consultatie voor. Volgens dit voorstel krijgt de regering met het oog op innovatie van de rechtspraak voor onbepaalde tijd de bevoegdheid om bij AMvB te experimenteren met het Nederlands burgerlijk procesrecht. Concreet wordt onder meer gedacht aan experimenten met een eenvoudige procedure voor het MKB, met een deskundige lekenrechter naast de gewone rechter en met een harmonieuze alternatieve echtscheidingsprocedure. De experimenten moeten blijven binnen de grenzen van EU-recht, verdragen en de fundamentele beginselen van procesrecht, maar verder is de bevoegdheid vrijwel ongeclausuleerd.
Het is de vraag of deze bevoegdheid strookt met (de strekking van) de Grondwet en past binnen de staatrechtelijke verhoudingen. De bevoegdheid is hoe dan ook te ruim doordat het experimenten mogelijk maakt en ook daadwerkelijk beoogt die de verwezenlijking van burgerlijke rechten en verplichtingen – tegen de wil van (een van) partijen – kan aantasten.
De wetgever moet zich driemaal bedenken voordat hij een dergelijke twijfelachtige en grotendeels onnodige carte blanche in handen van de AMvB-regelgever speelt.
Dat neemt niet weg dat de rechtspraak er zeker naar moet streven de civiele procedure eenvoudiger, sneller, flexibeler en effectiever te maken, waar nodig en aanvaardbaar met experimenten. Nog lang niet alle inventiviteit en creativiteit is uitgeput. Die experimenten hebben echter alleen zin, indien de financiële middelen worden verschaft om de consequenties te trekken uit een geslaagd experiment.

In the last couple of years we see new models of accessible and innovative jurisdiction, such as ‘neighbors judge’, ‘ejudge’ and the ‘office hour judge’. Are these innovations really new? This article gives insight into the Dutch legal history of accessible jurisdiction and compares the forms of accessible jurisdiction.

Current trends in the delivery of legal services create the opportunity to develop a new generation of access to justice platforms. On the basis of two examples, the author illustrates how this can work. M-Sheria is a technology-based access to justice service that serves the poor in Kenya. It combines state of the art information technology (USSD, SMS, internet) and human technology (community paralegals and pro bono advocates) to help slum dwellers solve their legal problems. Rechtwijzer 2.0 is an internet-based platform that provides online human and technology-facilitated support to people with a legal problem in the Netherlands. These examples show how processes and professionals can be innovated to facilitate dispute resolution in delivering information and interventions just in time.

In het artikel wordt de aanstaande wetgeving over het civiele procesrecht in eerste aanleg besproken, aandacht gegeven aan innovatieve initiatieven van de rechtbanken (sector civiel en kanton) voor de civiele rechtsgang in eerste aanleg en aangeduid hoe ook recente rechtspraak van de Hoge Raad een efficiënte rechtsgang in eerste aanleg bevordert.