After the Elections: A call for bold leadership from the Scottish Government on access to Justice
By Amanda Amaeshi
In a recent Lawmanity podcast episode, I highlighted that, too often, legal systems are shaped by fear – particularly during a global rollback of rights under pressure from far-right movements.
Commitments to equality and justice can be weakened when they are deemed “politically inconvenient”, sidelined by partisan political calculation. Scotland is not immune from this.
The newly formed Scottish Government and Parliament face a clear responsibility. This is not the moment for incrementalism or retreat, but for principled and sustained leadership: to challenge this rights backlash, and – more importantly – to strengthen the systems that allow people to seek justice and hold governments to account.
Here are some key steps that should define that approach.
Fund Access to Justice: Legal Aid Reform
If access to justice is to be treated seriously, legal aid must be a central priority.
Legal aid in Scotland, administered by the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB), helps people pay for legal advice and representation when they cannot afford it themselves. It covers advice and assistance, civil and criminal cases, and children’s hearings, with eligibility determined by financial circumstances and the nature of the case.
As recent University of Glasgow policy research notes:
“Legal aid promotes access to justice for all, not just those who can afford it. It is a foundational tenet for realising the Vision for Justice in Scotland and a human-rights based approach more broadly. Without a well-functioning legal aid system, people are forced to represent themselves – risking unbalancing the equality of arms, or more likely, do not pursue a remedy, risking a rights violation going unaddressed.”
There is broad agreement across academia, the legal profession, and civil society that the failure to address the legal aid crisis also puts the justice system – and those who work within in it – under significant strain. The 2025 Scottish Parliament inquiry into civil legal assistance identified an “urgent need” to improve access to justice, warning that people’s ability to exercise their legal rights is already being “severely compromised”.
These systemic shortcomings are most evident in the emergence of “legal aid deserts” –in some parts of Scotland, people who are eligible for legal aid are unable to find a solicitor able to take on their casedue to a shortage of legal aid solicitors in their area. Survivors of domestic abuse, for example, may have to contact dozens of firms before securing representation. This reflects deeper structural pressures within the system: a shrinking provider base, increasing workloads, and growing concerns about the long-term sustainability of legal aid practice, with significant numbers of solicitors considering leaving the field altogether.
Meaningful structural reforms and proper investment are needed, delivered through a new Legal Aid Bill. Reforms should include widening access to early and preventative legal advice, increasing financial eligibility thresholds for legal aid, and strengthening early intervention to prevent problems escalating into crisis. Legal aid rates and wider funding structures must also be reviewed in consultation with the profession to help rebuild the long-term sustainability of the sector.
Legal aid is often discussed primarily in terms of cost – but the evidence increasingly points in a different direction: investment in legal aid can prevent wider social and economic harms, from homelessness to ill-health, reducing pressures elsewhere in the system. Even so, reform should not be justified solely on the basis of its economic benefits – more fundamentally, access to justice is an intrinsic component of a society where justice is not merely rhetoric but a lived reality.
Safeguard Rights: The Scottish Human Rights Bill
Another key priority is the long-awaited introduction of the Scottish Human Rights Bill; crucially, the rights it contains must be enforceable in practice.
The proposed Scottish Human Rights Bill was intended to bring a range of international human rights treaties directly into Scots law, building on the earlier incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). These included protections relating to economic and social rights, racial equality, women’s rights, disability rights, and the right to a healthy environment.
During the previous parliamentary session, significant work was undertaken across government and civil society to develop the legislation – making the failure to introduce the Bill all the moredisappointing.
In the words of the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland (the ALLIANCE):
“This was a missed opportunity to improve accountability and actionability for rights in Scotland, and to act on the evidence and experience shared by so many rights holders, human rights defenders, and organisations. […] The next Scottish Government must prioritise passing a Human Rights Bill, taking a maximalist approach to incorporation within the constraints of the devolution settlement.”
But incorporation alone is not sufficient. Without accessible legal advice and mechanisms, effective routes to remedy, and properly resourced oversight bodies, there is a real risk of creating a new layer of legal promise without a practical route to justice.
This is why access to justice must be built into the foundations of any future Human Rights Bill. The Civil Society Working Group on Incorporation has called for the legislation to include “the right to an effective remedy on the face of the legislation”, ensuring that rights are tangible rather than aspirational. The ALLIANCE has also emphasised the need to adequately resource the Scottish Human Rights Commission so that rights oversight and accountability mechanisms can operate effectively.And, as the Human Rights Consortium Scotland has highlighted: “Learning from and strengthening the implementation of the UNCRC Act provides a crucial blueprint for delivery of the Scottish Human Rights Bill.”
Most people will never engage directly with constitutional litigation or specialist human rights arguments. Instead, they encounter the state through schools, housing, healthcare, social security, tribunals, complaints processes, and regulators.
Any Human Rights Bill must therefore be designed around systems ordinary people can realistically navigate – with accessible information, independent advocacy, meaningful remedies, and institutions giving effect to rights in everyday life.
Strengthen Accountability: Measuring Access to Justice
Finally, an often overlooked but essential part of the access to justice puzzle is data. Access to justice cannot be strengthened effectively if government does not properly understand which groups are disproportionately excluded from it. Transparency, accountability, and robust evidence must therefore form part of any serious programme of reform.
This requires more than headline statistics on court usage or legal aid expenditure. Government must be able to assess whether people can realistically access advice, remedies, representation, complaints systems, tribunals, and advocacy services when rights are breached. That means systematically gathering and analysing robust equality and human rights data to understand whose needs are being met – and whose are not.
The ALLIANCE has highlighted the lack of accessible and comprehensive data across public services, warning that without meaningful monitoring, it becomes far harder to assess whether the governmentis fulfilling its human rights obligations. Similarly, the National Advisory Council on Women and Girls (NACWG) has stressed the importance of intersectional analysis and disaggregated data collection, emphasising that differing experiences based on overlapping factors such as gender, ethnicity, disability, income, age, and sexuality must be properly understood rather than treated as secondary considerations. NACWG has warned that progress on in this area remains inconsistent, overly dependent on individual initiative rather than a systematic approach.
Without comprehensive data, systemic exclusion can remain hidden in plain sight. Measuring access to justice is therefore essential both for identifying where the system is failing and for shaping reforms that respond to the experiences of those most affected by inequality and exclusion.
Conclusion
At a time when rights protections are increasingly challenged internationally and political pressures can make justice appear “inconvenient”, there is a responsibility on both Government and Parliament not to retreat from these commitments, but to strengthen them. Rights must be enforceable and backed by institutions capable of delivering justice fairly and consistently.
Ultimately, rights are only as meaningful as the systems that allow people to enforce them. The task facing Scotland is whether it is willing to build and sustain those systems over the course of this parliamentary term and beyond.
