Increasing Access to Justice in Fragile Settings

This report explores the paths to increase access to justice in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations (FCS). It provides an analytical overview of the most common barriers to access to justice and presents the value and prerequisites of eight options available to governments to increase access to justice in these contexts. Fragile environments are considered among the most difficult for publicsector reforms, including judicial reform, partly because the root cause for fragility or conflict is often multifaceted. FCS are characterized by rapidly changing circumstances, differing levels of security, fragile and volatile political situations, low institutional capacity, and a weak enabling and investment climate for the private sector. The report takes these aspects into consideration and proposes context-specific policy implications. The report is intended for justice professionals and the general audience of development experts alike, and is designed to be a repository of data and country examples on common barriers and solutions for increasing access to justice in FCS. It can serve as a starting point for reform design and research toward good practices implemented across the world. The report relies on publicly available data and does not do any data collection. As such, it carries the limitations of the underlying datasets, including a general lack of data on outcomes and the unavailability of gender-disaggregated data. Section 1 discusses the determinants of access to justice and defines the concept of fragility used throughout the report. Section 2 uses publicly available data to extract common barriers to access to justice in FCS and organizes them around the three dimensions of access to justice. Section 3 outlines ways that these barriers can be addressed with corresponding in-country applications. Section 4 concludes by summarizing the policy implications of this analysis for governments