Trend Report | Part 1 - HiiL

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2.1 At Least One Serious Problem in 5 to 10 Years Traditionally, legal needs have been estimated through analysis of the use of legal services and judicial institutions. The number of disputes that are resolved by courts, arbitration panels or mediators have been used to illustrate the levels of disputes in the society. Or the number of issues leading to private legal advice or state funded legal aid can be used as indication of legal needs. Finally, legal needs might be estimated through the amount of public resources invested in official and unofficial dispute resolution processes. 41 But many problems never reach courts or these sources of legal advice. Furthermore, bare statistics do not tell us what the alternatives to official justice are. Do people bury their problems because they cannot reach courts or do they get access to justice by other means? Since the 1970s the legal needs of the people are estimated in a radically different approach. Looking for ways to improve legal aid systems, researchers collect evidence about met and unmet legal needs. The so called ‘justiciable events’ approach focuses on people and their experiences to portray how law affects their everyday life. 42 A justiciable problem is not a legal term. It is a recognizable situation from life, described in comprehensible language, which has a legal solution but can also be resolved through other means (such as a simple discussion between the parties). Not all problems with potential legal solutions are justiciable. Many situations are trivial and should not be regarded as problems that have to be solved with legal means. So research into legal needs tends to be limited to problems with a certain level of intensity. What all legal needs studies find is that many people experience difficult legal problems, but the proportions vary greatly. In 2003, 67,5% of the interviewed individuals in the Netherlands reported experience with at least one serious and difficult to resolve legal problem for the last 5 years. 43 Six years later, 60,5% of Dutch respondents reported that they had to deal with a justiciable problem. 44 A lower incidence of legal problems is reported in studies from the US (50%) 45 and New Zealand (51%) 46 despite the fact that these studies covered more problems or asked for household experience as opposite to individual experiences. Studies from Canada 47 (44,6%), Russia 48 (31%), Ukraine 49 (54%) and Bulgaria 50 (46,3%) find that about half of all respondents recall at least one serious and difficult to resolve legal problem. 41 An excellent comparative overview of such input data is assembled every 2 years by the European Commission on the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), see www.cepej.org. 42 Hazel Genn defines justiciable event as “a matter experienced by a respondent which raised legal issues, whether or not it was recognized by the respondent as being “legal” and whether or not any action taken to deal with the event involved the use of any part of the civil justice system.” See below footnote 51 at p. 12 43 Van Velthoven, B. C. J., & ter Voert, M. 2004. Paths to Justice in the Netherlands. Looking for signs of social exclusion. In K. Caminada, & B. C. J. van Velthoven (Eds.), Department of Economics Research Memorandum 2004.04: 28. Leiden: Leiden Univesity. 44 Van Velthoven, B. C. J., & Klein Haarhuis, C. M. 2010. Geschilbeslechtingsdelta 2009. Over verloop en afloop van (potentieel) juridische problemen van burgers. Den Haag: Boom Juridische Uitgevers. 45 American Bar Association, Consortium on Legal Services and the Public, “Legal Needs and Civil Justice. A Survey of Americans”, Chicago (1994) 46 Maxwell G. et al. “Meeting Legal Needs”, New Zealand: Legal Services Board (1999) 47 Currie, A. 2010. The Legal Problems of Everyday Life The Nature, Extent and Consequences of Justiciable Problems Experienced by Canadians: Department of Justice, Canada, available at http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/pi/rs/reprap/2007/rr07_la1-rr07_aj1/toc-tdm.html 48 Study conducted by PILnet Russia, report on file with the authors 49 Study conducted by International Renaissance Foundation Ukraine, report on file with the authors 50 Gramatikov, M. “Multiple Justicable Problems in Bulgaria” Tilburg University Legal Studies Working Paper No. 16/2008. HiiL Trend Report – Part 1: Challenges and Promising Approaches 27
In her influential Paths to Justice (1999) study Hazel Genn reports that 34% of the respondents from England and Wales have experienced a non-trivial legal problem 51 . A 2001 study from Scotland finds that 23% of the respondents experienced a legal problem. 52 By far the lowest proportion of justiciable problems are reported in a study from Japan 53 (19.5%) closely followed by recent research in Moldova 54 (22.5%). Population survey conducted in Mongolia reports that about 31.5% of the respondents report that they ever had an experience of approaching judicial institutions such as courts, police officers or prosecutors. 55 With a couple of assumptions, we can use the existing data in order to calculate a rough prevalence of legal problems per 1,000,000 people. For instance, the 60.5% of the Dutch citizens who reported experiencing a problem, reported an average of 3.1 problems in the past 5 years. From this, we can calculate approximately how many problems are dealt with by the adult population in the Netherlands; 375,000 significant and difficult to resolve legal problems per 1 million per year! Similar calculations suggests that each year there are 446,000 legal problems per million adult Canadians. In Bulgaria there are just less than 200,000 legal problems per million. For England and Wales the prevalence is very similar - 205,000 justiciable events per year per 1 million adult citizens, and for countries such as Japan and Moldova the incidence of justiciable problems is likely to be in the range of 150.000 per million. This means that we can conservatively estimate that the average adult person in the world encounters at least one justiciable problem every 5-10 years. 2.2 Ten Frequent Problems Almost invariably consumer disputes are the most frequently reported justiciable events in developed and transitioning countries. Given the huge number of transactions it is no surprise that almost every study reports that consumer problems are experienced most frequently. In fact only two studies report that non-consumer problems were more prevalent - study of villagers in China and an Australian study which looked at a broader mix of civil and criminal disputes. 56 Unfortunately, comprehensive studies on poorer, non-western societies are much harder to come by. A study on small samples of vulnerable people in Azerbaijan, Mali, Rwanda, Egypt and Bangladesh suggests a different picture. 57 51 Genn, H. G., & Beinart, S.. Paths to justice : what people do and think about going to law. Oxford, England ; Portland, Or.: Hart Pub (1999). In a later study in England and Wales, Pascoe Pleasence found a similar proportion - 36% of the respondents faced a justiciable problem. See Pleasence, P., Buck, A., Balmer, N., O’Grady, A., Genn, D. H., & Smith, M. 2004. Causes of Action: Civil Law and Social Justice. London: Stationery Office. 52 Genn, D. H., & Paterson, A. 2001. Paths to Justice Scotland. What People in Scotland Do and Think About Going to Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing 53 M. Murayama, S. Minamikata, R. Hamano, K. Ageishi, I Ozaki and I. Sugino, Legal Problems and Their Resolution: Disputing Behaviour in Japan, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, Paris, July, 2005. p. 2 54 Study conducted by Soros Foundation Moldova, report on file with the authors 55 UNDP with Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia & Open Society Forum, Access to Justice: Needs Assessment Report (2005), available at: http://www.forum.mn/res_mat/AccessToJustice_eng%20.pdf 56 Michelson, E. 2007. Climbing the Dispute Pagoda: Grievances and Appeals to the Official Justice System in Rural China. American Sociological Review, 72: 459-485, Coumarelos, C., Wei, Z., & Zhou, A. Z. 2006. Justice made to measure: NSW legal needs survey in disadvantaged areas: Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales. 57 See above footnote 17. HiiL Trend Report – Part 1: Challenges and Promising Approaches 28
Page 1 and 2: Trend Report | Part 1 Towards Basic
Page 3 and 4: Table of Contents Executive Summary
Page 5 and 6: But if we take 300 problems as a st
Page 7 and 8: A third problem for adjudicators is
Page 9 and 10: Choice of Third Party Adjudication
Page 11 and 12: Trend Report Basic Justice Care 1.
Page 13 and 14: This is what can happen if innovati
Page 15 and 16: Making Justice Needs Tangible and V
Page 17 and 18: The vision behind justice needs app
Page 19 and 20: Analytical Framework: A Process Giv
Page 21 and 22: Universal Processes And Local Pract
Page 23 and 24: Clients: Data obtained through (pot
Page 25 and 26: For employment conflicts, divorce,
Page 27: Trend Report Basic Justice Care 2.
Page 31 and 32: Ten Frequent Problems Problem Incid
Page 33 and 34: Many of the respondents there live
Page 35 and 36: Extremely or Very Somewhat Number E
Page 37 and 38: 2.4 Tensions in Vital and Close Rel
Page 39 and 40: This means that a simple framework
Page 41 and 42: For this, they tend to build on dis
Page 43 and 44: 3.1 Many Helpers, Many Paths to Jus
Page 45 and 46: "My husband was very violent on me
Page 47 and 48: Using focus group interviews she fi
Page 49 and 50: Inaction to legal problems is not d
Page 51 and 52: An Australian survey found 79% sati
Page 53 and 54: A Five Task Dispute Resolution Mode
Page 55 and 56: Filing documents in which issues ar
Page 57 and 58: Another problem can be that the rol
Page 59 and 60: The demand for timely decisions dri
Page 61 and 62: Towards classification Legal needs
Page 63 and 64: 3.5 Summary In many countries, ther
Page 65 and 66: As we have seen in Chapter 3, only
Page 67 and 68: They argue that rules allowing only
Page 69 and 70: In their celebrated paper on the ec
Page 71 and 72: It is considered not the task of ap
Page 73 and 74: This perspective still leaves a lot
Page 75 and 76: Models for low cost legal advice Si
Page 77 and 78: The Biggest Legal Aid NGO in the Wo
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However, the NGO’s do not yet hav
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Villager’s Committees in rural Ch
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Better laws are also unlikely to be
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Trend Report Basic Justice Care 5.
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A Strategic Framework for Access to
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Task Terms of Reference for Procedu
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Possible Elements of Terms of Refer
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Benchmarks for the way specific pro
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Big investments in informing people
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Smart way of looking for the releva
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In civil law systems, the legislato
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SEWA (Self-Employed Women’s Assoc
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An underlying vision would be to cr
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In 2011, the European Union took th
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It is interesting to look at the in
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Notwithstanding all the positive de
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Timap for Justice (a paralegal prog
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Facilitadores Judiciales in Nicarag
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“Collaborative Law” The “coll
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The Many Effects of Having Adjudica
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Abunzi: Locally Elected Courts in R
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Properties of Dutch Employment Term
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5.6 Using Reputation to Induce Comp
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Using Reputation Incentives to Incr
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Sharing knowledge: The challenges a
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This developed in clear best practi
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It is a given that culture and prac
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If the available data are assessed
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Dispute resolution know-how has dev
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This report assessed what is needed
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This report is not an appeal to spe
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HiiL is an independent research and
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