Innovation

The project idea exhibits a creative and relatively new idea that will improve the protection of legal rights of accused people within the applicant’s respective country or local community.

Further Explanation
An innovative project is one that demonstrates a novel and original approach to improving the legal rights of accused people. This includes projects that incorporate cutting edge ideas and bring a fresh perspective to their legal environment. Importantly, the project needs to demonstrate an excellent assessment of the root causes of the problem at hand, and the ability to set standards and benchmarks on the right to personal liberty, human resources, and administration of justice.

This could include a new way to assess the problem at hand, and/or a new method of solving legal problems. Projects that have good overall strategies, have considered many angles to achieving the goal and have focused on the best approach.

Projects that scored highly in innovation exhibit these qualities
Projects that stood out demonstrated why their project idea/ method is new and has an element of inventive thought and lateral thinking.

Examples of projects that scored highly
1) Using untapped resources, such as training inmates to be paralegals offers an economically viable solution to overcrowding in prisons and lack of legal representation. This approach is different from others trying to reach the same goal. 2) Using mobile telephones to coordinate volunteers with legal aid lawyers uses information technology in an innovative way to stop secret imprisonments. 3) A project to abolish the Holding Charge in Nigeria challenges the legal instrument that holds inmates without trial through litigation. This demonstrates a new assessment of the fundamental problem to the lack of rights for accused people.

Projects that scored poorly exhibit these shortcomings
Projects that lack innovation are incapable of showing that they are doing something different then other organisations already in existence. Furthermore, projects that demonstrated a poor assessment of the root causes of the lack of legal rights in their community.

This includes projects that lacked research into whether/ how the problem is being addressed by other groups, and cannot demonstrate how their project will add merit to the existing legal environment.

Examples of projects that scored poorly
Project that purported to raise consciousness for the accused of their rights by stationing volunteers in court did not clearly explain any additional value then other groups trying to solve the same problem.