Guest piece by FLAC Chief Executive Eilis Barry: A new Sustainable Development Goal on Civil Justice

Eilis Barry is Chief Executive of FLAC (Free Legal Advice Centres).

In March 2020, the United Nations approved the first ever Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator focused on civil justice in Target 16.3.3, which will form part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The UN describes the SDGs as providing a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.

There is an increasing recognition of the links between a lack of access to justice and social exclusion and wider social problems, and the role of legal assistance services in efforts to address continuing poverty and inequality and to improve social. Access to justice is also important to democracy and the rule of law.

The new civil justice indicator follows on from the adoption by the UN General Assembly in July 2017 of two global indicators for Target 16.3 as part of the SDG Global Indicator Framework, which focused exclusively on criminal justice. The access to justice needs of poor, vulnerable or disadvantaged groups and individuals were not provided for.

This has now been addressed in Target 16.3, the text of which is to “Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all.”

The indicators are of particular interest and relevance to the work of FLAC. Indicator 16.3.3 is the “Proportion of those who experienced a legal problem in the last two years who could access appropriate information or expert help and were able to resolve the problem.”

The World Justice Project have set out the advantages of the indicator:

• It is people-centred, as it measures the experience of legal problems from the perspective of those who face them.
• It provides a broad assessment of public justice needs by capturing legal problems that occur inside and outside of formal institutions.
• It captures an important dimension of unmet legal need and access to justice that is measurable, actionable, and policy-relevant.
• It focuses on some of the most important barriers to accessing justice and resolving legal problems – legal aid and legal capability – that disproportionately affect the poor.
• It is experience-based.
• It is a tight indicator that is amenable to crosscountry comparisons, but also that could accommodate different types of problems if necessary.
• It can be estimated with only four questions, which could be easily incorporated into ongoing national surveys.
• It is analogous to the experiential indicator on crime reporting for SDG indicator 16.3.1.
• It draws on methodological guidelines derived from a comprehensive review of more than 60 national surveys in more than 30 jurisdictions in the last 25 years.
• It has been estimated in a comparable way in 101 countries by the World Justice Project with samples of 1,000 respondents in each country.
• The indicator can be disaggregated by gender, age, and income.

Years of work and prepartion led to this very significant development. Huge credit is due to Professors Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer, Co-directors of the Centre for Empirical Legal Studies, University College London, who drafted global guidance on the conduct of ‘legal needs’ surveys. Professor Pleasence also led the drafting of a standalone access to justice chapter in the new UN Handbook of Governance Statistics, and provided assistance to the OECD, Open Society Justice Initiative and UN bodies in specifying the new target.

While the SDGs are not legally binding, governments are expected to take ownership and establish national frameworks for the achievement of the goals. Countries have the primary responsibility for follow-up and review of the progress made in implementing the goals, which will require quality, accessible and timely data collection.