Justice Sector Assessment
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The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index
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By: Carolyn A. Dubay, Associate Editor, International Judicial Monitor
In October 2010, the American Bar Association World Justice Project issued its first report summarizing the results of the initial implementation of its Rule of Law Index - a quantitative rule of law assessment tool applied to various countries throughout the world. The Rule of Law Index claims topresent “a comprehensive set of new indicators on the rule of law from the perspective of the ordinary person.” This perspective is based on a bottom up assessment of how the rule of law exists in practice through data drawn from local residents and experts. In this way, it is an endeavor to view the rule of law in any given society by the experience of those who live in it, and not simply an assessment of whether government actors have formally adopted particular rule of law norms and practices. While the October 2010 report discusses the results of the initial study of 35 countries, it is only the first in an annual series that will expand to cover 70 countries in 2011 and 100 countries by 2012.
The Index itself is a highly detailed framework in which to assess the extensive amount of data gathered in the years preparing this report. For this first review of 35 countries, new data was been collected and categorized into 10 elements deemed critical to the existence of the rule of law in any given society: (1) the existence of limited government powers; (2) the absence of corruption; (3) clear, publicized and stable laws; (4) order and security; (5) the recognition of fundamental rights; (6) open government; (7) regulatory enforcement; (8) access to civil justice; (9) effective criminal justice; and (10) the existence of informal justice mechanisms. These 10 factors were further divided into 49 subfactors. Each country has received a score for each subfactor, based on over 700 variables drawn from individual surveys (1,000 respondents per country) and local legal experts.
Substantively, the report is divided into regional reports and individual country assessments. The regional highlights are largely narrative, and to that extent, user friendly for lay persons and those new to the rule of law field with practical experience but an aversion to complicated statistical information routinely relied on in policy-making. These regional narratives demonstrate that every nation, rich and poor, faces the challenge of improving its justice sector institutions to maintain faith in the rule of law. Importantly, the regional highlights also show how every nation may vary in terms of relative strengths and weaknesses on each rule of law indicator. For example, among the regional reviews include the conclusion that Western Europe and North America continue to struggle with access to justice, while the criminal justice systems in most Latin American countries rank among the worst in the world, even where such countries receive high marks in other rule of law indicators (such as freedom of thought and expression). In Asia, Singapore is the top-ranked country amongst the indexed countries in providing security and access to civil justice to its citizens, but ranks very low in assessments for open government, limited government powers, and fundamental rights. In South Asia, on the other hand, India ranks at the top among lower-middle income countries in terms of government accountability, clear and stable laws, and open government, but suffers greatly in terms of access to justice resulting from court congestion and delays in processing cases. The individual country profiles contain the detailed statistics and data collected for each country, presented in charts, graphs and tables. Each country is assigned scores by factor and sub-factor, and the data includes comparisons with regional and socioeconomic peers.
The World Justice Project has marketed the Rule of Law Index as an instrument for strengthening the rule of law by providing policy makers, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and other constituencies the ability to assess a nation’s adherence to the rule of law in practice, to identify a nation’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to similarly situated countries, and to track changes over time. It presents itself as more comprehensive than other rule of law assessment tools because it relies entirely on new data from independent sources, rather than data aggregated from third party sources or self-reported by governments or other interested parties.
The Rule of Law Index joins a somewhat crowded field of assessment tools, indices and indicators in the burgeoning rule of law field. The ABA itself, which sponsors the World Justice Project, has no less than eight indices available for rule of law practitioners through the ABA Rule of Law Initiative, including the Judicial Reform Index, the Legal Profession Reform Index, the Prosecutorial Reform Index, the CEDAW Assessment Tool, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Index, the Human Trafficking Assessment Tool, the Legal Education Reform Index, and the Detention Procedure Assessment Tool. The World Bank offers its own Justice Sector Assessment Handbook, which is used to generate rule of law assessments to inform programming carried out under World Bank initiatives, including the development of its Country Assistance Strategies. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) also produces a Guide to Rule of Law Country Analysis with its own framework for conducting justice sector assessments. On a broader scale, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) has developed a handbook entitled Assessing the Quality of Democracy: A Practical Guide.
Given the abundance of data and frameworks for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of individual country justice systems, the future use of the Rule of Law Index remains to be seen. For researchers and analysts, it could prove a very fertile data set for future studies on regional and national variances in justice sector functions. It may also provide a sound benchmark not only for progress in rule of law reform, but backslides as well. These uses may depend, however, on future commitments to maintain and update the data, especially as political situations can rapidly change in developed and developing countries. The data set could also benefit from a presentation in a form that users can sort and manipulate. For example, International IDEA features a number of online databases that allow users to compare individual countries on a variety of issues.
Overall, there is no doubt that the Rule of Law Index provides invaluable insights into the perspective of local participants in their interaction with justice sector institutions. Understanding these perceptions may be central to understanding how to not only build expectations that demand a culture of lawfulness, but how to meet those expectations in the future.
International
Judicial Monitor