Next Steps in Realizing Justice for All

June 21, 2019

Next Steps in Realizing Justice for All

The Global Justice Gap

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lay out ambitious targets to guide global and national development policies through 2030, including target 16.3's promise to "ensure equal access to justice for all." However, a growing body of research shows that the world is not on track to meet this target. World Justice Project's own recent assessment of the global justice gap showed that an estimated 5 billion people have unmet justice needs globally, including people who cannot obtain justice for everyday problems, people who are excluded from the opportunity the law provides, and people who live in extreme conditions of injustice.

Learn More About the Justice Gap

An important portion of the justice gap are the estimated 1.4 billion people who have unmet civil justice needs. Many governments have attempted to understand and address civil justice issues by relying on administrative data from courts, but this adopts a narrow view of justice and does not capture the experiences of people who seek justice from informal mechanisms, or from those who do not take their justice issues to any authority for adjudication or mediation. The challenge is clear: more and better data is needed for countries seeking to measure their progress on delivering justice for all in the context of the 2030 development agenda and their own national development plans.

Upcoming Report: Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019

On June 27, 2019, WJP will release its newest report, Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019, capturing comparable data on legal needs and public access to civil justice on a global scale, representing the voices of more than 100,000 people in 101 countries.

The report is a follow-on to the research presented in WJP's Global Insights on Access to Justice 2018, which presented data gathered for 45 countries polled as part of the WJP's global study on legal needs and access to justice. The 2019 report will show data for an additional 56 countries and will feature updated country profiles and downloadable summary statistics for all 101 countries polled in 2017 and 2018.

Drawing on surveys of more than 100,000 households in 101 countries, our data will help illuminate the prevalence of justice problems around the world, who people turn to in resolving their justice problems, obstacles people typically encounter to meeting their justice needs, and the myriad ways in which justice problems affect people’s lives.

Take a Closer Look at Access to Justice

Sample country profile from Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019. The new WJP report will be released on June 27, 2019.

The Path Forward

Realizing justice for all is a large and complex challenge, and the path ahead will require:

Multi-stakeholder commitments to justice. Last month, WJP hosted the 2019 World Justice Forum, an important milestone for building a worldwide community dedicated to realizing justice for all. At the conclusion of the Forum, governments, organizations, and individuals joined in showcasing their justice initiatives and Commitments to Justice. These declarations of further action to accelerate implementation of SDG16 set the pace for outcomes that will feed directly into the HLPF in July and the UN Summit on the SDGs in September.
Promoting effective, sustainable, and replicable approaches to closing the justice gap at the community level. Since its founding, WJP has provided over $1,000,000 to support rule of law initiatives on five continents. On May 2, 2019 at the World Justice Forum in The Hague, Netherlands, WJP announced five $10,000 prize-winners in a worldwide competition to identify and highlight effective and promising work to increase access to justice. More than 250 World Justice Challenge applications were judged on impact, sustainability, replicability, scalability, and promise for the future.
Meaningful measures of progress. The World Justice Forum showcased cutting-edge efforts by governments, civil society, and researchers to meaningfully measure access to civil justice in Argentina, Indonesia, South Africa, and Ukraine. Among these efforts were legal needs surveys designed to study civil justice issues from the perspective of ordinary people rather than institutions, and to capture data on the diverse ways in which people navigate their legal problems. Our own global studies discussed here also demonstrate that it is possible to meaningfully measure access to civil justice from the perspective of ordinary people using a globally comparable methodology.

It is our intention that the globally comparable methodology and data presented in our upcoming Global Insights on Access to Justice 2019report will provide a reliable, people-centered approach to understanding and monitoring the state of access to civil justice at the national and global levels. As member states gather to assess their progress and commitments to target 16.3 as part of the High-level Political Forum and SDG Summit, we encourage them to welcome specific proposals for a legal needs survey-based approach for evaluating and ensuring access to justice.