Access to Justice and Legal Empowerment : A Review of World Bank Practice
This paper reviews the World Bank's existing work in access to justice and suggests directions for further Bank engagement in this area. Accesses to justice efforts are grouped here into six categories: court reforms, legal aid, information di...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2009/11/11409605/access-justice-legal-empowerment-review-world-bank-practice http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18102 |
| Summary: | This paper reviews the World Bank's
existing work in access to justice and suggests directions
for further Bank engagement in this area. Accesses to
justice efforts are grouped here into six categories: court
reforms, legal aid, information dissemination and education,
alternative dispute resolution, public sector
accountability, and research. The paper is motivated in part
by recent discussions of 'legal empowerment;' a
thread of inquiry that runs through the review is: how do
World Bank efforts to increase access to justice affect the
agency of poor people? The paper concludes with insights and
recommendations that emerge from the Bank's experience.
All justice reform interventions should attend to
particularities of sociolegal context, should consider the
specific justice needs of poor people, and should be planned
not in isolation, but from a system wide perspective. Legal
services and legal aid interventions should confront the
challenge of scale, should consider alternative methods of
service delivery, and should in some cases take care to
maintain at least partial independence from the state. The
use of non-court dispute resolution mechanisms should be
guided by the benefits achieved in cost, time, harmony, and
fairness. Evaluations of access to justice programs should
go beyond 'headcounts' to demonstrate impact on
users of justice services as well as on society at large and
to weigh opportunity cost. |
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