Reflections from the High-Level Judicial Dialogue at Justice Matters 2026

As people-centred justice moves forward on the continent, how do we ensure those most vulnerable do not get left behind?

Last week, I attended the High-Level Judicial Dialogue: Building People-Centred Justice Across Africa and Iberoamerica, a side event of the Justice Matters 2026 conference. Organised by the African Alliance for People-Centred Justice and the Ibero-American Alliance for Access to Justice, the session brought senior judges from both regions into a peer-to-peer conversation about how courts can deliver justice that works for people, not simply for institutions. The framing was deliberate: justice cannot continue to be treated as a post-conflict afterthought. It is a frontline strategy for preventing conflict, addressing grievances, and building stability. 

What stood out across the dialogue was a shared insistence that judicial independence on its own is not enough. We live in societies marked by polarisation, digital immediacy, and disinformation campaigns that flatten complex judicial decisions into aggressive political narratives. Justice cannot be an institution isolated from people, but neither can it be held hostage to political or media pressure. Transparency, as one speaker put it, is not simply about publishing information, it is also about building public trust, and strengthening judicial and legal systems is critical to recommitting the social contract between citizen and state. 

What is people-centred justice? 

People-centred justice, as defined by Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, places individuals and communities at the centre of justice systems and focusses on delivering practical, locally relevant solutions to the problems people actually face when seeking justice. It does not replace formal courts, it reframes them as part of a broader ecosystem that includes informal, community-based, and customary mechanisms. Its starting point is that justice problems are not randomly distributed: some groups are more likely to suffer injustice, and meeting their needs requires deliberate design. The African Alliance for People-Centred Justice (AAPCJ), launched in Dakar in November 2024, has emerged as the key continental platform driving this agenda. Its three strategic goals are to build a shared understanding of people-centred justice, mainstream it into national justice delivery, and gather the data and evidence needed to measure whether justice systems are actually improving people's lives. 

One of the speakers at the event, The Honourable Justice Catherine Ogunsanya of the High Court of Ogun State in Nigeria captured the urgency well. She noted that it is usually only during elections that governments remember their people, and that while open justice is a global phenomenon, our attention in Africa needs to confront the everyday reality that many of our people simply cannot access justice. Degraded infrastructure, ongoing insurgencies, and overstretched court systems mean the formal apparatus is often inadequate. Panellists emphasised that the law itself is not neutral, it operates within societies shaped by power dynamics, economic disparity, and cultural norms, and delivering people-centred justice requires a socio-legal approach and indicators that measure real-world impact. 

The harder question: people-centred justice in conflict 

The principles set out at The Hague are necessary, but they were largely framed against the backdrop of stable, functioning states. Africa continues to grapple with overlapping local, national, and regional conflicts, and the question of what people-centred justice looks like in these contexts cannot be deferred. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of conflicts on the continent but when looking at two of the most large-scale current conflicts, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the ineffectiveness of people-centred justice, or really any robust architecture of justice accountability, becomes painfully clear. 

In Sudan, nearly three years of war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have produced what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called an abyss of unimaginable dimensions. Briefing the UN Security Council in January 2026, the ICC Deputy Prosecutor confirmed that war crimes and crimes against humanity continue to be committed in Darfur, with patterns of detention and killing of civilians from non-Arab tribes that mirror earlier atrocities. Sexual violence is also widely being used as a weapon of war, alongside other violations including arbitrary detention, displacement, and looting of private property. The conviction of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman in October 2025 was a landmark first, but the scale of ongoing atrocities far outweighs any sense of progress. 

In the DRC, the picture is no less stark. A UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded in 2025 that all parties to the conflict in North and South Kivu, including the Rwandan-backed M23, the Congolese armed forces, and allied Wazalendo militias, have committed acts that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Between January and September 2025, the UN recorded more than 81,000 sexual violation claims in eastern DRC, a 31.5% increase on the previous year. 

Holding perpetrators to account, and ensuring that citizens have access to accountability and justice, or at the very least that their experiences are heard and recorded, matters in both contexts because accountability is what makes any future people-centred justice system credible. Without it, the social contract between citizens and the state cannot be rebuilt. In a conflict environment where so much of that contract is already eroded, the absence of accountability risks producing societies marked by entrenched violence and militarisation, where citizens turn to more violent options, such as joining militias and armed groups, as their only route to a sense of justice or retribution. 

Why the tenets of people-centred justice become tenuous in conflict 

The principles championed at the Justice Matters: dialogue, transparency, citizen participation, judicial independence, and the use of data to identify priority justice needs, all become deeply complicated in active conflict. Take data, which the AAPCJ explicitly identifies as a core objective. In civil conflicts, evidence is rarely a neutral commodity. It is politicised, contested, and often deliberately altered, erased, or rendered impossible to collect in the first instance. Mass graves are exhumed before forensic teams can document them. Witnesses are intimidated or displaced. Digital evidence is taken down or weaponised by competing narratives. As Human Rights Watch noted in its April 2026 reporting from Uvira, protecting evidentiary sites is itself an accountability priority because, without it, future justice efforts have nothing to build on. 

Transparency becomes fragile when the public infrastructure that underpins justice, courts, registries, archives, hospitals issuing medical reports, is destroyed or captured by armed actors. Citizen participation depends on civic space that conflict actively closes down, as the recent targeting of human rights defenders by M23 in eastern DRC makes clear. Judicial independence becomes a casualty too: in the DRC, military courts continue to try civilians in breach of international fair trial standards; in Sudan, the formal judicial apparatus has been hollowed out, and accountability now relies heavily on external mechanisms such as the ICC and on the rigorous documentation work of civil society networks, that often opens them up to security threats. 

A regional and national agenda is critical to people-centred justice 

If people-centred justice is to be more than an aspiration in conflict-affected contexts, it must be pushed forward as a deliberate regional and national effort, not left to the goodwill of individual judiciaries. This is where existing African instruments matter. Specifically, and the Maputo Protocol which was adopted in 2003 and in force since 2005, set out to guarantee comprehensive rights including political participation, social and economic equality, reproductive autonomy, and protection from gender-based violence. As of August 2025, 46 of the African Union's 55 member states have ratified it, with Sudan among the seven that have signed but not ratified. The Protocol is the most comprehensive regional framework we have for the very groups whose access to justice is most precarious in conflict, women and girls who are systematically targeted through sexual and gender-based violence in Sudan, in eastern DRC, and across other conflict zones on the continent. 

Re-centring the Maputo Protocol means more than ratification. It means domesticating its provisions into national law, resourcing the institutions tasked with implementing it, and aligning judicial reform agendas with its standards. The AU's accountability tools, including the Maputo Protocol Scorecard and Index, already exist to track implementation. What is needed is the political will to use them, and a recommitment from states even, and especially, when public infrastructure for justice is threatened. The same logic extends to the African Charter, the AU Transitional Justice Policy, and Agenda 2063's Goal 11 on justice. 

Humanitarian and conflict prevention organisations working on the ground have a role here too, and one that is too often siloed from the justice conversation. Their efforts to bolster citizens' access to judicial information, their understanding of their rights, and their ability to record violations and war crimes as they happen, are themselves foundations for any future people-centred justice system. They are also a form of conflict prevention in their own right, and should be strengthened and supported. When citizens can document what has happened to them, and trust that the record will not be lost, the foundations are laid for re-centring people and their experiences in any post-conflict settlement, and for ensuring that what they have lived through is not forgotten or sidelined. 

People-centred justice in conflict is not only about inventing new frameworks, it is about insisting that the ones we have apply consistently, and survive the test of changing political and socioeconomic conditions, and that the documentation work happening in the most difficult corners of our continent is recognised as part of the architecture of justice itself. 

What this means going forward 

The High-Level Judicial Dialogue at The Hague was an important step in connecting African and Iberoamerican experiences of building courts that serve people. But the harder, and more urgent, conversation for our continent is what people-centred justice means when the courts themselves are under siege, when evidence is contested terrain, and when the populations most in need of justice are the ones least able to claim it. Sudan and the DRC are clear examples of how quickly justice can erode under competing priorities, and thus show us whether people-centred justice can hold its meaning when it matters most and for those most vulnerable. If the AAPCJ and its partners can carry these principles into the harder ground of conflict-affected contexts, and if African states can recommit to the instruments they already have, then there is a real possibility of building justice systems that do not collapse the moment a crisis arrives.