Improving Access to Justice in Liberia : A 2023 JUPITER Assessment

Liberia's lack of effectiveness in handling judicial disputes has been consistently recognized as a weakness and one of the main obstacles to the country's transition out of fragility. Liberia performs poorly in international datasets benchmarking justice and the rule of law. For instance, in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index (WJP RLI), it ranked 112 out of 140 countries in 2022, meaning that it is among the thirty countries with the weakest adherence to the rule of law. This study originates from the Government's desire to improve the delivery of justice to its citizens and to have recommendations on a practical sequence of reforms that are underpinned by hard data and analytics. In a first-of-its-kind JUPITER assessment, a standardized methodology is used to benchmark the state and performance of Liberia's judiciary against specific measures of effectiveness and to compare key features across countries. The study focuses on the effectiveness of the system in service delivery in three areas -- access to justice, efficiency, and quality -- and presents the main challenges that emerged from the empirical work to provide data-informed context-specific suggestions for reform