Participant representation answers a structural weakness in adjudication: the person with the most at stake is often the least able to advocate — impaired, distressed, unhoused, or simply outmatched by the institutions deciding about them. So high-consequence decisions carry a right to an independent advocate, and the independence is the whole point: the advocate cannot belong to the body imposing the restriction, or the process is only auditing itself.
The advocate’s role is not to insist the participant is always right. It is to ensure someone in the room is structurally assigned to ask the questions institutions forget under load: are we taking more jurisdiction than the problem requires? what does this participant actually want? what route would restore more of their self-jurisdiction? It is the procedural companion to keeping the participant present in their own adjudication — decisions made with them, not merely about them.