SPPI Showcase: the economic benefits of legal aid

The SPPI Showcase Session at the IBA Annual Conference in Seoul launched a report by the IBA Access to Justice and Legal Aid Committee and the World Bank which examines the economic benefits of legal aid programmes around the world. Legal aid is not only a fundamental principle of a fair society but also astute economics, as it saves considerable government expenditure in various areas.

Klaus Decker, Senior Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank:

The reason the World Bank has worked with the IBA on this report is fundamentally what we call the global justice gap. There are 235 million people that live in extreme conditions of injustice worldwide. One and a half billion people cannot resolve their justice problems. Four and a half billion people are excluded from the opportunities the law provides. These are numbers based on research about the global justice gap that you will find in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

This justice gap undermines development, reinforces the poverty trap and imposes high costs on society. So it’s a development challenge and that’s why the World Bank, as a development organisation, is interested in this area, as it is in infrastructure, water, education, health, governance and so on. Access to justice is really fundamental, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable people, which is why legal aid is such a key element for our work on justice sector reform.

Legal aid is the right thing to do. If you were to explain it to your children, I think that’s probably how you would first phrase it. You would say, ‘it’s just the right thing to do, because you treat poorer people the way that you want to be treated. You want them to have access to justice as much as anybody else, if not more, because they need law and justice sector institutions more so than people with deep pockets.’ I think your kids will understand that very easily. But our ministers of finance and ministers of justice don’t necessarily look at it this way. So we have to find additional arguments, and that is one of the reasons why the IBA and the World Bank came up with the idea of this study. There are economic arguments that support investment in justice and in legal aid in particular. Data shows that there is a clear correlation between access to justice and human capital formation. And causality probably goes both ways: if you have low human capital, you are likely to have low access to justice. But also if you have a low level of access to justice, you don’t build up human capital. This means that investing in access to justice will lead to higher human capital.

“The reason the World Bank has worked with the IBA on this report is fundamentally what we call the global justice gap… 4.5 billion people are excluded from the opportunities the law provides

Klaus Decker
Senior Public Sector Specialist, World Bank

Now, unaddressed legal needs affect individuals, but beyond that, of course, their families, the justice system, the economy and society at large. In fragile and conflict-affected countries in particular, justice is important. Legal aid is important to mitigate the potential for conflict and violence.

To summarise, taking a quote from James Goldston of the Open Society Justice Initiative: ‘In short, we now understand that justice and governance are no less important to equitable and sustainable development than good schools, functioning health clinics, roads.’

Rosemary Chikwendu, a mediator working in Nigeria and a consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime from 2012–2015:

I’m going to be talking about access to justice in Nigeria. Different jurisdictions are in different stages of legal aid. Some don’t have legal aid schemes at all; some have legal aid schemes that are inefficient; and some are working on their legal aid system. I would like to start by saying that legal aid is the core ingredient of access to justice. And access to justice is a basic principle of the rule of law. It is the manifestation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is the sure means of actualising fundamental human rights. One of the main obstacles faced in accessing justice is the cost of legal services. The fundamental human rights of individuals are lost when they do not access justice.

I would like to look at the major challenges faced by the Legal Aid Council of Nigeria. They include inadequate funding; delay in treating case files by the Director of Public Prosecutions; delay investigating the case by the police; and delay in the administration of justice by the courts.

Yes, legal aid has its benefits, both to the citizenry and to the government. If legal aid is provided there will be a reduction in the cost of providing legal representatives to the indigent citizens. The prisons will be decongested, because the prisons in Nigeria are overpopulated and over 75 per cent of the people in the prisons are not convicts, they are people awaiting trial.

“One of the main obstacles faced in accessing justice is the cost of legal services. The fundamental human rights of individuals are lost when they do not access justice

Rosemary Chikwendu
Mediator, Nigeria; Consultant, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012–2015

Legal aid lowers the cost of prison reform initiatives; it reduces the costs of running the prisons; it reduces crime; it reduces the costs of crime prevention; it increases manpower. So the government should be made to understand the importance of legal aid.

I also say that a citizen’s right to access to justice cannot be overemphasised. The work that legal aid does is to ensure that justice is accessed by those who are not able to do so for themselves. A society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. We need to start acting.

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, criminal barrister, Member of the House of Lords, human rights and equal opportunities activist, writer, broadcaster and Director of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute:

There is an old quote that we all as lawyers know and like: ‘The law, like the Ritz Hotel, is open to all.’ But you try going there in your old raincoat and see whether you are ushered in with great aplomb, unless they know that you are one of the world’s billionaires. We know that the nature of law is fundamental to our society. Rule of law is the spine, it’s the backbone of nations.

And, unfortunately, there are some nations that think we’re really talking about rule by law, rather than rule of law, and don’t know that there’s a distinction. The rule of law is something imbued with many other values. It’s not just about creating a set of rules and then making sure that people abide by them, that’s about law and order. That isn’t what the rule of law is about.

We know that. But sometimes it’s problematic to get that into the heads of politicians and also persuade the general public that the law is there for them, too. And sometimes it is important to step back and to look at the fundamentals of why we came into law and what we think law is about.

Law has its beginnings in democracy, certainly of a social contract. The contract is that we create laws for the better running of society in the interests of all of us. And the social contract is that we hand over some of our concerns and some of the wrongs that happened to us to the courts. We go to the courts with our problems for a resolution instead of taking revenge or our sense of injustice in our own hands. We take them to the courts for resolution, because we know that it is a better way.

When you look at the parts of our world where there are serious divisive conflicts, you can be sure that it’s partly about an absence of justice. And so that social contract means that people have to have trust in the system, to trust that there’s a place to go when you are wronged. And if you don’t get that, you end up with civil disobedience, with distrust, with disaffection and with societies that are not well functioning.

I recently wrote a book about the #MeToo movement. Everybody will have their own views on the #MeToo movement. Around the world women went onto social media and used that newly available medium to speak about the wrongs that they had experienced, the ways in which their lives were diminished and how they felt degraded and humiliated or undermined.

“#MeToo was a brick through the windows of legal systems the world over, to say “you’re not delivering justice for women in these areas

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
Director, IBA’s Human Rights Institute

The problem for many of them wasn’t that they hadn’t ever complained or that they had seen others complain and saw what happened to those others who complained. They said ‘the justice system is not delivering for us’. So the #MeToo movement has been civil disobedience – using a new medium, the internet – going online, sometimes anonymously, to name and shame people whom they say have caused them distress, misery, wretchedness in their lives. Now that, to us as lawyers, is not about justice. Because, of course, if people are being accused of things, they should have the opportunity to defend themselves, to present their side of an argument and so on. But that’s what people will do. #MeToo was a brick through the windows of legal systems the world over, to say “you’re not delivering justice for women in these areas”. And it’s a reminder to us about how we in law have to make sure that we have our systems and that those systems are giving place and space to everybody to secure justice.

This is a heavily abridged version of the full discussion which, along with the report, can be viewed online at tinyurl.com/ibaseoul