Access to Justice in Sweden from a Comparative Perspective
Posted: 1 Oct 2018
Date Written: July 1, 2018
Abstract
The ground-breaking 2017 UK Unison case came within months of a Swedish legislative proposal as to establishing a discrimination claims tribunal. The UK Supreme Court in Unison held that access to justice was a constitutional common law right. The Swedish proposal in contrast was modelled after an existing commercial consumer claims tribunal issuing only non-binding decisions based simply on written submissions, a solution also presented under an access to justice reasoning. The disparity between these two legal solutions, access to justice as a constitutional right and as a consumer right, highlights several of the core reasons why discrimination plaintiffs in Sweden are not successful. This paper first focuses briefly on the Anglo-American historical development of the concept of access to justice and then examines how access to justice has been addressed in Sweden against this historical background. Though the differences of approach are often explained as simply that between common and civil law, this paper demonstrates that they are instead anchored in the interplay between civil society, government agencies, courts and lawmakers, as well as a concept of law (regardless of whether judge-made or statutory) as individually enforceable or simply societal guidance.
Keywords: access to justice, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, discrimination
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