QUITO, ECUADOR – The inaugural First Inter-American Summit of Public Defenders: Open Justice and Artificial Intelligence brought together legal and public defense leaders from across Latin America and the Caribbean to explore collaborative, technology-driven strategies for expanding fair access to justice. At the gathering, the Dominican Republic emerged as a central voice shaping the regional conversation on balancing judicial innovation, transparency, and inclusive public defense systems.
Leading the Dominican delegation was Rodolfo Valentín Santos, who holds dual roles as director of the country’s National Office of Public Defense (ONDP) and Caribbean regional coordinator for the Inter-American Association of Public Defenders (AIDEF). Speaking during a dedicated panel focused on humanizing judicial processes, Santos framed meaningful access to justice as a goal that extends far beyond basic legal representation. For marginalized communities and ordinary people to benefit from fair judicial outcomes, he explained, they must first be able to understand complex judicial procedures and engage fully with every stage of the legal process.
Santos used his platform to showcase the progressive initiatives the Dominican Public Defender’s Office has rolled out in recent years to advance these goals. These efforts include expanding core legal services to underserved communities across every region of the country, launching virtual assistance channels to support families of incarcerated individuals, increasing systemic transparency through regular public prison reports, and integrating targeted digital tools to strengthen protections for fundamental human rights.
A core focus of the summit centered on the growing role of artificial intelligence in modern judicial systems, and Santos offered a balanced, stakeholder-centered perspective on AI integration. He emphasized that while digital tools hold great promise for boosting judicial efficiency and increasing procedural transparency, they must never replace the critical human element of legal representation or amplify existing structural discrimination in justice systems. Santos closed his remarks with a call to action for all regional governments: build regulatory and operational frameworks that ensure AI acts as a tool to expand access to justice, rather than creating new barriers that limit it for vulnerable populations.
By the close of the three-day gathering, all participating countries united behind a shared commitment to advance three core priorities: deepening cross-regional collaboration on public defense reform, embedding ethical guardrails for artificial intelligence use in judicial systems, and modernizing public defense infrastructure across the hemisphere. The collective goal, delegates agreed, is to build justice systems that are more transparent, inclusive, and accessible to all people across Latin America and the Caribbean.