Global Program on Justice and Rule of Law

Citizens in most countries perceive justice delivery to be ineffective, corrupt, and subject to subversion. Similarly, private businesses frequently identify courts as the biggest obstacle to their operations. Governments are interested in understanding users’ perceptions as well in changing them by improving the system. Effective justice institutions are vital to growth and equality. When justice institutions operate effectively, accountability increases, trust in the government grows, and citizens and businesses can invest with confidence that their rights will be protected. Lack of access to justice often leads to violence and societal conflict. At the extreme, such conflict results in civil war, increasing poverty and limiting the potential of a nation for shared prosperity.

To support governments efforts to improve judicial service delivery, the WBG’s Governance Global Practice created JUPITER – a universally applicable country-based assessment framework for measuring the effectiveness of a country’s judiciary in three areas: access to justice, efficiency, and quality.

The goal of JUPITER is to identify strengths and weaknesses of the judicial system to establish a practical sequence of reform and capacity development actions. The output of the assessment is a report that provides the analytical underpinning for dialogue on justice reform and helps prioritizing efforts according to the country’s needs.

JUPITER focuses on three institutions: the Judiciary, the Ministry of Justice, and Legal Aid Services. Oher institutions and services are captured only for their effects on the key institutions’ performance. 

JUPITER attempts to distinguish between the legal framework and the practice. In some areas, the two coincide (for example, for most efficiency measures). In other areas, they do not, and JUPITER will distinguish between what the law established and the actual usage, thus providing insights on the implementation gap.

Data collection is done through a combination of readings of the law, administrative data, and interviews with government officials, judges, lawyers, and court users. JUPITER assessments take approximately 6 months to complete, and they are carried out by the Global GOV team in cooperation with regional colleagues.

This version of JUPITER is intended for piloting, to determine whether it can serve as the basis for a universal assessment. Piloting is underway in Liberia and South Sudan. Based on this test, further adjustments will be made to the methodology. JUPITER is intended as a complement for existing assessments and analytical products produced by the WBG (e.g., Functional Reviews, JPEIRs, etc.).

In July 2022, the Governance Global Practice set out to create a dashboard displaying data on the judiciary globally, with funding from the State and Peacebuilding Trust Fund. The objective was to create a one-stop shop for researchers, governments, World Bank staff at the global as well as the regional level, other development banks, and other such stakeholders that synthesizes existing data on perception towards the judiciary. The Justice Factsheets is a curated set of metrics assessed and quantified by various development organizations, surveying entities, civil society organizations, academic institutes, etc. that allows users to visualize existing justice indicators per country, region, and other metrics of performances. Through it, the aim is to compile and summarize the current attitudes of users (individuals, businesses, lawyers, among others) on the effectiveness of judicial services across a range of countries and judicial systems across the world.

While several existing datasets measure citizens’ or businesses’ perceptions of judicial independence and efficiency, there is no consolidated dataset of attitudes towards the judiciary, despite data being the traditional entry point for justice and rule of law reform. The Justice Factsheets, thus, aims to fill this gap by presenting a focused dataset with insights, which will allow the production of (i) country profiles and (ii) broad-based cross-country analytics that can be used when engaging with governments. The Justice Factsheets will thus enable, through a customizable and user-friendly interface, open and freely available for download data with multiple visualizations of a country’s justice service delivery performance relative to a set of comparators. The data set and the Justice Factsheets will be a useful tool for broad cross-country comparisons and analytics, but alone it is insufficient to formulate specific reforms in particular country contexts. Such reforms, and evaluation of their progress, need to be informed by much more detailed and country-specific diagnostic data that can identify the relevant constraints on judicial service delivery in particular country circumstances. Thus, the team has thus developed a methodology to carry out this diagnostic through ‘JUPITER’ (Justice Pillars Towards Evidence-based Reform) – a single, universally applicable country-based assessment for measuring the state and performance of a country’s judiciary against specific measures of effectiveness. The JUPITER assessment focuses on 3 pillars that are key to assessing the effectiveness of the judiciary in service delivery as determined based on over 100 peer-reviewed academic studies: access to justice, efficiency, and quality.

Thus, to create the dataset and the Justice Factsheets, the team started by surveying all data available on the Justice and Rule of Law arena and reviewed all major primary and secondary sources. Such data is from other organizations, and our team at the World Bank does not produce any of this data. With time, it hopes to produce and include JUPITER data in the dataset and the Justice Factsheets. This curated dataset is useful because instead of collecting new data, it complements existing databases on other areas of government service delivery and organizes relevant measures about the attitudes on the effectiveness of civil judicial services in one readily available and customizable tool.

As mentioned, the findings from the indicators provide an overview and empirical guidance to initiate policy dialogue, supplementing a more in-depth JUPITER assessment. This curated selection is made available through Prosperity Data360.