[MUSIC]
Hello on day two on CCC Camp 2023.
We are here at Bits and Boymay if I'm not mistaken, yes.
Thank you, thanks for the confirmation.
As you probably know, otherwise you wouldn't be here.
There are services that people are denied or
that are buried behind legal barriers that cost a lot of money,
a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge, and
language knowledge, and all the other stuff to get behind to.
So here, our next speaker is here to talk about how technology
could address the cost and help these people defend their human rights.
So please welcome with a very warm round of applause for
Access to Justice for Human-Centered Design Tech, Viraj.
>> Hey all, just wanted to say firstly, thank you for coming.
I appreciate it.
This talk is largely gonna be about human rights issues that
I've encountered, human rights issues that I've encountered while working.
And then kind of use technology to address these issues.
If you guys wanna ask questions or
just chat throughout my presentation, feel free to do so.
So I'll- >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Like this, is this better?
Okay, thank you.
Yeah, so I think the first slide's gonna go through specifically my experience.
But then also, I think the first question to ask for
is whether technology should even have a place.
So on the left is places where I worked and
have seen technology to really help.
I was a refugee lawyer, so I conduct refugee applications.
A lot of it is form filling before you get to the courts.
Police accountability, it's more how do you actually stop police and
then provide accountability during the interaction.
Genocide in Myanmar, we found that a lot of people that in internal displaced camps
would have access to phones, but they didn't have access to any other type of
information.
General legal advice, I'll talk about that more in the next slide.
But where I've really found that technology did not have a role was in
First Nations or indigenous populations where no one has a phone,
you don't have landlines, you don't have access to computers at all.
And they are still trying to be interventions through technology to
address some type of structural problems in remote communities.
So this is one example where I think technology should have a role.
And prototype fund has, they funded one of my projects called my rights.info,
which applies human centered design principles to the European Court of Human
Rights.
And this is the world's largest human rights database in terms of case law.
This court produces the most amount of cases that has ever existed on human
rights.
But its functionality is so flawed that if you filter by English,
you'll get cases that are only available in French.
So as a lawyer, this has, like it first to me sounded funny, but
then it became quite problematic quickly.
So if a refugee comes into my office and then I start looking for
cases that are descriptive of their issues to start advocating for them,
I have no comfort that if I type in their factual description,
that I'll actually see the cases that apply to this person.
There's no comfort at all.
And for me, that's quite scary if it's like,
especially if it's in a human rights situation.
If it's something like tax or commerce, it's a little bit less scary because their
lives literally not at danger.
So this is where I think tech would have a role and should have a role.
So I'll go into some of the project that I worked on,
structural problems that I've seen.
And then how I think technology should be viewed to change human rights issues.
The first one I'd like to talk about is police accountability.
And then this is how my journey in human rights started.
When I was 18, I was arrested without charge, put into cells overnight,
did not know what happened.
I'd been searched multiple times throughout my life.
And then at this point, I was always looking at what could I have done in that
situation, what information should have had at that situation that could have
helped, and then after that violation happened,
how could I obtain some type of remedy?
And then that's kind of what put me into the crack of law, human rights and
tech, because if you, and in that situation, I wasn't able to access lawyers.
I didn't have money.
I didn't have information about, like my family didn't know lawyers.
They didn't know the system, right?
So it's like, can I challenge this?
How should I challenge this?
I knew something bad happened to me, but I felt powerless.
I made an app in New Zealand that basically tells people,
it's not what not to do, which is how the law is framed, right?
Don't commit a crime.
Don't do X.
But it tells people what they can do.
Everything's linked to specific case law where people have,
where people successfully challenge the cops.
You can also see case law where the judge will literally say that police have been
caught to be lying, forging evidence.
And if most of the information that exists about police accountability, again,
is these are your rights, this is what you can do, this is what you can't do.
But I think the narrative really needs to change to be something like the people
that are going to be stopping you are trying to violate your rights.
And in that situation, you have to take proactive action.
So the police accountability app that I made, it records the police, and
then also depending on which factual scenario you're in,
will lead you to a set of information.
So if, are you walking in public?
Are you walking down the street?
So it's kind of like having a lawyer in your pocket.
That if a police officer stops you, you can be like, hey,
I'm not holding anything.
Like, you don't have the right to do this for me.
It tells you what to say, and everything's linked out to the case law.
The second issue that I've had was as a refugee lawyer, you get a lot of
situations where a refugee will come into your office or other client's offices.
And they've suffered political persecution, like grievous bodily harm.
They've seen multiple people dying around them.
But they can't speak English, and they don't know what the legal process is.
When you're working at a not-for-profit legal space,
you have about 20 minutes, I'd say, at maximum with each refugee.
The classic situation that happens is a refugee will come in, and
they immediately start talking about the harm that they've faced.
And that's obvious, right?
But that's not the information a lawyer requires to actually advance their claim.
This literally results in this, like I've seen it happen multitudes of time,
where you'll have to tell the person, hey, stop, we need this information.
People are gonna cry, they're emotional.
And then the questions that you have to ask are,
how many family members do you have in Australia?
And obviously, the future will be like, why?
Why are you asking me this?
This has nothing to do with my harm.
And the majority of time that you spend on these type of humanitarian visa
applications is completely bureaucratic.
There's also an issue that, so that in addition to these interviewing issues,
you have invisible requirements.
So let's say that you, again, the same question.
There's a field that says, do you have family in Australia?
If you are a competent refugee and you can speak English and you have the ability,
let's say you were a lawyer in your home country and you can fill out a form,
you could submit this form and your form would fail.
Because these certain paragraphs have invisible requirements,
which you're only told once you've failed.
So in that same places, do you have family in Australia?
You have to put commas slash slashes and say where they live and
also provide contact information.
And this information's not on that form.
So basically, what I started building was a refugee form filler,
where you can change the question language to any language that you're in.
It also has decision key logic.
That same form, it's called the 861 application form,
asks you for your name eight times, right?
And section three will be like, give out your family information,
even though you would say, no, I have no family in the first question.
So you can use decision key logic to really simplify this process.
But the biggest thing is that if you translate this form to Arabic,
now you have your client who's actually aware of the process that they're going
through.
They know the challenge that you're facing and the problem to solve.
So again, it's like looking at technology, it's not so much like,
we're just gonna make this application easier.
But it's literally about allowing people to empower themselves through the process
that you're engaging in.
And the next project that I've working on is general legal advice,
which I think brings this together.
So prototype funded a project that I'm working on called myrightstoreinfo,
which relates to this database.
Myrightstoreinfo took, the purpose of it was people don't understand the law,
cuz it's complex.
It's hard to access a terrible database that doesn't even work if you imagine
that it works by principle.
And it was how, if you're walking down the street and
a police officer stopped you, or let's say your child was taken away by
social services and you don't know what your rights are.
How do you solve this problem?
And what's the best way of going about this?
And again, it was kind of look from the human center design principle of looking
at the problem and looking up instead of looking down on how to provide information.
So myrightstoreinfo has three different points that you can access this
information for three different audience members.
The first is by filling out a questionnaire that just has binary options,
like did this harm happen to you, yes or no.
At the end of that questionnaire, you'll be presented with the violations that
apply to you.
You can go further and then look at all the cases that apply to you.
Then there's also the second application,
which is looking at law more in terms of a social aspect.
So all the cases in this database have been fed into an infographic.
So if you're a researcher and you wanna see, hey, how did the court
start deciding on, let's say, gay marriage rights?
And at what year did they do this?
And how did they look at that compared to the right to torture?
Now you can choose which articles that you wanna view across a timeframe and
then see what the court is thinking.
And the third one is just, it's an advanced text search feature,
which is like your classic search feature.
But again, something that the QDoc database doesn't do,
is they don't even have a spell check.
And legal names are difficult and law words are difficult.
So I think just introducing a spell check has made a huge improvement in
the lives of lawyers.
So it's kind of just looking at basic access principles,
basic human centered design principles to break down these problems.
So as I was saying, everything is designed with accessibility in mind.
And I think one of the issues that really comes to play is that the average
reading age, I probably shouldn't have talked.
>> You feel really hot?
>> [LAUGH]
>> It's a good place.
>> 23.5 degrees Celsius.
>> Let's go to the lake.
>> Drink enough water and have a great time.
>> You get two more minutes.
>> Two minutes?
>> No, no, you get the dish in two minutes.
>> I just feel bad if some really important information was provided.
Yeah, okay.
[LAUGH]
So the average reading age of the world is the age of a ten year old.
Legal information, I find difficult to understand.
So how do you provide, you can't even achieve a basic accessibility
principle just on the information that you're seeing.
So how do you solve this, right?
It's such a weird obstacle that everyone here is owed human rights, but
I doubt 95% of people even know what that means and
how to actually use your rights.
And it's done by, I think it's done by purpose.
But so this My Rights for Info is also looking at it from not just accessibility,
but people that have accessibility issues also need to be able to access the law.
And most legal information websites don't have this.
So the entire website's built in grayscale,
which allows people with visual disabilities to be able to access the information.
Everything apart from the legal information that's provided is written that
a ten year old can understand this.
Screen readers are utilized, so if you have visual impairments as well,
you can utilize the screen reader to start understanding legal information.
And I think that's also a really big gap,
is targeting invisible populations that have their rights discriminated, but
then also targeting them to actually receive rights-based information that
they can utilize.
And that's the end of the show.
If anyone has questions, feel free to ask.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> So no need for additional two minutes, awesome.
>> Unless we have very many questions.
Let's start with the first one.
>> Thank you very much, it was a really nice talk.
And I'm really, really happy, so I'm actually part of a project called
Access to Justice, funny enough.
Much smaller scope, so it's kind of German perspective.
And we have two kind of projects, and one is kind of open data for
law and cases and so on, so kind of the third part.
And the second project is on kind of simplifying access for
getting your rights, so kind of form filler.
So it's super nice that you kind of exactly talked about these two projects.
And yeah, I think it's really, really hard to build services that
work for everyone and that do the right thing.
And we're kind of also trying to do the next step of actually sending your,
like filling out your form and actually sending it digitally,
which currently isn't possible in Germany.
As a private person,
you can't send anything into the digital justice system in Germany.
Only lawyers can do this.
This is supposed to come, who knows, like Q1 this year, supposedly.
But postponed.
So yeah, I would love to chat afterwards.
And yeah, accessibility is super important, and we're trying to test this.
And it's really hard, but at least it's really nice that you're doing this and
people are working on this.
>> Yeah, and I should say all the tools that I've built,
I'm still like a practicing lawyer.
And I think, unfortunately, any human rights system that's not radical in
nature has to be conformed to the actual limits of the system.
So most of the tools that I create will help people that will really reduce this
distress of a lawyer, right?
Like tries to take away 80% of their work where they can just focus on
the substantive aspect.
So even if you do have this form filling exercise,
as you've correctly pointed out, you still have to send it to a lawyer.
A lawyer will never believe anyone apart from themselves.
So they'll still check everything.
But if you can make their lives easier, they could focus on more clients per day,
focus on the tougher challenges.
And Australia and New Zealand, where these applications are predominantly made,
apart from my rights for info, unfortunately,
I think a lawyer still has to be in the picture.
>> Next question over here.
>> First of all, thank you so much.
This has been enlightening.
And one thing that I wonder is, in the aspect,
I understand that you are building technology and
that you are working with these people who need aid.
My question is, how do you get to those people?
Because most of the time when they need that help, they don't know where to find it.
And that is something that as hacktivists,
we have all these spaces that we can help, but
there's no way to reach someone that really needs it.
Right now, because we are small, we are not fully funded.
>> Yeah, so this is my personal experience.
I don't know if I can provide advice generally, but I've always worked as a
lawyer and then in activist communities.
And I know the issue that you're talking about.
So the police accountability app that I've made, certain communities in
Australia will see any app as something that they can't trust and rely.
But I was part of Melbourne activist legal support where we go into protests and
then provide legal advice to people that have stopped completely.
I sued the police for a living basically.
So I did have groups where, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> I had groups that I could gain trust and
knowledge and I think that's also another big thing with technology.
You have to be invested in that community.
You have to be part of it for that really to have any type of hold and trust.
I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I went about it.
>> Totally, it's exactly what we do.
>> Can you look into the microphone, please?
>> No, yes.
>> [LAUGH]
>> All right, cool.
Further questions apart from, behind me, sorry.
>> Hi, I was listening to you on live stream and I just rushed here.
>> Thank you. >> Because I didn't want to miss
the question.
But this is not a question actually.
I'm a designer and I was wondering if there is any way we could help you do
these things because I work with accessibility and
all kinds of guidelines related to colors and everything that is there.
And I really like what you're doing and I would love to chat.
That's all.
>> Yeah, 100%, let's talk after, okay.
>> Yeah, right now we have- >> Further questions,
let me check behind my back, nope.
In the audience, someone there who could build a fax interface for
the German government.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Yeah, of course.
Yes, over there, give me a second.
>> And I wanted to ask the question after the last one.
You said that you are very active in the community and
that you talk to people in protests that were mistreated by police.
>> Yeah. >> Is that most of the,
cuz that lets me ask the question, is there anybody else you can reach or
is it mostly just the people directly in a community, directly there?
Are you mostly working with the people that are in your communities or
do you have ways to reach outside of those or
maybe people that don't have any communities?
>> Well, I wouldn't know how to reach people that have no communities.
[LAUGH]
If they have, yeah, I mean, I've never thought about it like that.
Again, I can give you my personal experience.
So most of the police accountability work that I did as a lawyer,
like either working in volunteer organizations or
litigating the police happened in a span of about three to four years.
And in that time, it took me about two to three years to get into the right networks.
And in these networks, let's say I'm working as a strategic litigation lawyer,
you'll be working with a community law center, and
then you'll also be working with a police accountability organization.
Those two organizations will get community members, normally a youth member,
normally someone who's part of that community and has a political space in there.
And then you inform those community members of what you have and
then they can distribute it if they'd like.
But I think if I see most of the downloads that I have for
a lot of the applications I do are global.
So if you type in know your rights into the Play Store,
the police accountability app comes to the top.
But that's just for New Zealand.
So it's kind of like, you're right,
it's like getting to that community is definitely the hardest part.
But again, it's like you have to just be there.
>> All right, and with that, we are at the end of our time.
>> Awesome, thank you. >> Thank you very much.
So please give a very warm round of applause for Las Vilas.
Thank you very much.
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]