Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 November CILC organized a working meeting in Moscow on legal aid delivery in the Netherlands. Russian legal aid experts were briefed by CILC experts Herman Schilperoort and Edwin Borghs – Executive Secretary and Staff Executive of the Dutch Legal Aid Board – in a two day event that was staged at the Moscow branch of the global network for public interest law, PILnet.
CILC experts Borghs and Schilperoort (first and second on the right) with PILnet Director Shabelnikov, legal aid expert Olga Shepeleva and social scientist Asmik Novikova (first, second and third on the right) at the working meeting in Moscow.
The working meetings focused on quality standards and quality assurance in legal aid provision and on ways to monitor the effectiveness of the legal aid system. The Dutch experts spoke extensively about the methodologies they developed for safeguarding quality. Next to the basic conditions for registration of Dutch legal practitioners who enrol in the legal aid system, CILC’s experts put much emphasis on the development, the use and the expedience of specially designed client satisfactory surveys, peer review techniques, and best practice guides. The discussions held in the course of these meetings will result in an advisory note to the Russian Federal Ministry of Justice on implementing quality standards in the Russian civil legal aid system.
This working meeting is part of the multi-annual Dutch-Russian project Implementing the civil legal aid system in Russia that is funded by the MATRA programme of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.