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A. Goldston, James

  
Open Society Justice Initiative 
 
224 West 57th Street, New York, New York, 10019, United States | TEL +1-212-548-0600 | FAX +1-212-548-4662 | justice.initiative@opensocietyfoundations.org
 
 
 
Thank you for this opportunity to offer remarks on the importance of human rights 
and the rule of law in the post-2015 development framework.   
 
My organization, the Open Society Justice Initiative, works to promote access to 
justice and the rule of law around the world through advocacy, litigation, research, 
and community based justice services. At the same time, we are centrally engaged 
in a debate about the next global development agenda. Over the past year, member 
states, working through the Open Working Group, have made much progress. And 
yet, a major question remains: what role will justice play in the next generation of 
development goals?  
 
For people around the globe, it is no secret that the rule of law, good governance, 
and human rights are necessary preconditions to peaceful, stable, and prosperous 
societies.  
 
Justice for Development: integrating 
justice and human rights into the post-
2015 development framework 
Remarks by James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society 
Justice Initiative, to the President of the General Assembly’s High-level 
Event on “Contributions of Human Rights and the Rule of Law in the post-
2015 Development Agenda” at its session on June 10, 2014. 
REMARKS  TO UN GENERA L ASSEMBLY  
 
  
2 REMARKS TO UNGA   
The day-to-day consequences of barriers to justice are practical and restrictive:  
 
- Without secure property rights or means for claiming them, poor people 
cannot invest.  
- Without reliable and responsive criminal justice institutions, people do 
not feel safe to send their children to school or go to market to trade.  
- Without legal identity, one cannot access services, open a bank account 
or, in some countries, acquire a mobile phone.   
- Rule of law deficits – corruption, armed conflict, inefficient public 
institutions – perpetuate poverty and inequality.  
 
And it’s not only people who understand the link between justice and development. 
States get it too. Just last September, the General Assembly affirmed that the rule of 
law is of “fundamental importance for … the further development of the three main 
pillars upon which the United Nations is built: international peace and security, 
human rights and development.” 
 
In short, we now understand that justice and governance are no less important to 
equitable and sustainable development than good schools, functioning health 
clinics, and passable roads.   
 
And yet, what do we do with this knowledge? How concretely do we integrate 
justice and governance in the development agenda?  
 
I will address these questions in three ways: First, I will recall the many positive 
impacts that justice and good governance have had on development.  Second, I will 
discuss how justice and governance can—and must—be incorporated into targets 
in the new development framework. And finally, I will respond to the concern that 
justice and good governance are not measurable.  
 
 
Justice and governance are critical for 
development 
 
In 2011, the World Bank’s World Development Report heralded an end to the 
divide between justice and development. This landmark study found that 
addressing injustice and insecurity is fundamental to poverty reduction.  In the 
years since, evidence of the links between justice and development has only 
expanded.  
 
Just a few weeks ago, the legal empowerment organization Namati, which Open 
Society Foundations supports, published a comprehensive evaluation of nearly two 
hundred access to justice and social accountability programs. The findings are 
striking. When government and civil society groups support people to understand and 
claim their legal rights, development processes are not only more inclusive and 
equitable; they also drive better health, stronger educational outcomes, and wealthier 
communities.  
  
3 REMARKS TO UNGA   
 
Allow me to give you some examples.     
 
Over the course of one year, in 25 villages in Uganda, the government, the World Bank 
and local organizations partnered to improve health outcomes by fostering greater 
community engagement in health service delivery. Armed with more information about 
health policies, local residents developed scorecards rating the performance of health 
clinics and met with service providers. In just one year, under-five child mortality was 
33 percent lower; vaccination rates improved; and community members utilized more 
health services with lower waiting times.  
 
An Indian NGO helped over 300 people access their public food grain records through a 
new right to information law, then analyzed the information to expose inconsistencies 
with the amount of subsidized grain actually received. Public hearings and other 
pressure helped improve grain distribution to poor families. Based on this success, the 
Delhi local government incorporated public participation mechanisms into the city’s 
Public Distribution System.  
 
In Mozambique, Uganda and Liberia, community based paralegals have contributed 
to more secure and equitable land governance, and to resolving intra-communal 
and territorial disputes.   
 
In Bangladesh, efforts focused on raising women’s awareness of rights and 
responsibilities around marriage have been reported to help decrease the size and 
frequency of illegal dowry payments.  
 
In Ecuador, the expansion of access to legal information and advice helped address 
physical violence against women. 
 
People in many countries have used a judicially enforceable right to information 
(RTI) to monitor public spending and advocate for change.  
 
In Chiapas, Mexico, rural community members found out through RTI requests that 
a government sewage project had been contaminating local water. With that 
information, they successfully advocated for authorities to halt the project and 
install proper filter systems. 
 
Legal identity documentation has been found to be a “determining and aggravating 
factor for social, economic, and political exclusion—for men and women alike”. 
Several projects underway—involving Nubians in Kenya, persons of Haitian 
descent in the Dominican Republic, and Roma in Macedonia and Serbia —
successfully deploy low-cost, community-based paralegal schemes to secure legal 
identity documents, including birth certificates and identification cards, essential 
for access to citizenship, education, and health care. 
 
In Ontario, Canada, the provincial government allocates funds for independent 
community legal service centers to provide advice to citizens to promote healthier 
and safer livelihoods.   
 
  
4 REMARKS TO UNGA   
In short, while models of collaboration vary from place to place, the principles 
remain the same north and south, east and west: projects which promote justice 
and enhance the rule of law foster more equitable, inclusive and sustainable 
development.  
 
Targets for the new development framework  
 
Given the essential connections between justice and development, how do we 
actually incorporate these linkages into the post 2015 framework?  In fact, many 
governments are already doing so through targets contained in their national plans.   
 
Indonesia has adopted numerous economic reforms and developed robust safety-
net policies in recent years that have helped drive poverty alleviation.  Two specific 
targets on justice in Indonesia’s mid-term development plan for 2010 to 2014, 
commit the government to:  
 
 Increase the number of justice seekers who report “comfort, certainty, and 
security in their interaction” with the state, and 
 Increase the “trust and respect [] the general public” have for law 
enforcement and government justice institutions. 
 
South Africa is another example.  In 2010, President Jacob Zuma tasked the National 
Planning Commission to develop a national development plan to guide South 
Africa’s progress.  The Commission concluded that justice, safety and good 
governance are central to South Africa’s efforts to eliminate poverty and reduce 
inequality. The 2030 development plan includes specific commitments to:  
 
 “Realise a developmental, capable and ethical state that treats citizens with 
dignity.” And to 
 “Ensure that all people live safely, with an independent and fair criminal 
justice system.” 
 
Indonesia and South Africa are not unique.  Across the world, government-led 
poverty reduction strategies and development plans include targets on justice, 
governance, and safety.   
 
Afghanistan’s poverty reduction strategy from 2008—the blueprint for government 
and donor policy—included a goal to ensure that the “public can rely on effectively 
organized and professionally staffed, transparent and accountable justice 
institutions.”  The Afghan plan offers concrete justice and governance targets 
including that “justice institutions have access to infrastructure, transportation, 
equipment, and supplies adequate to support effective delivery of justice services” 
and that “citizens are more aware of their rights and are better able to enforce 
them.”   
 
As far back as 2001, Honduras incorporated justice and governance into its 
development plan, and included a target to “achieve parity and raise by 20% the 
Human Development Index related to gender.”   
 
  
5 REMARKS TO UNGA   
In 2005, Mongolia adopted a 9th development goal - to ‘strengthen human rights 
and foster democratic governance’ – with three targets and 12 monitoring 
indicators.   
 
Many other countries have followed suit.   
 
The Secretary General’s High Level Panel, the Open Working Group, and others, 
have offered suggestions for potential targets in the new development framework, 
but I want to use this opportunity to put forward a few concrete recommendations.  
These targets are contained in a statement developed by over 200 civil society 
organizations from 50 countries. They have been endorsed by eminent persons 
including Desmond Tutu, Mo Ibrahim, and former presidents of Brazil, Mexico and 
the United States:  
 Government should ensure that access to legal identity is universal and all 
people can participate fully in society. A target could be to “ensure that no 
one suffers from a lack of legal identity.” 
 Government that should ensure communities and individuals, including 
women, have secure rights to land and property. A target could be to 
“increase the amount of land for which communities have secure tenure and 
decisions are taken through an open and accountable process” or to 
“increase the share of women, men and communities with secure rights to 
land and property.”  
 People should know about the laws and regulations that govern their lives, 
particularly those concerning essential services. A target could be to 
“guarantee the public’s right to information and to access government data.” 
 Finally, citizens must have a role in shaping the fundamental, everyday work 
of their governments.  A target could be to “ensure the participation of 
citizens in monitoring essential services, including water, healthcare, and 
education.” 
 
Indicators of progress under the new development 
framework 
 
Having demonstrated the connection between justice and development, and 
describing some possible ways to incorporate these linkages through targets, I will 
conclude by responding to the most frequently voiced concern I have heard in these 
debates - that justice is not measurable.  
 
In fact, governments have a long tradition of using indicators to monitor progress 
towards justice and governance:  
 
- Ministries of justice and judiciaries regularly gather administrative data 
on case volume and duration.   
- Security agencies and departments of health track homicide and crime 
statistics.  
  
6 REMARKS TO UNGA   
- National statistics offices regularly include justice, legal knowledge, and 
access questions in surveys to document the lived experiences and 
perceptions of people.   
- Dozens of governments collect information on birth registration rates, 
and developing countries increasingly have full or partial data on 
registration of children.  
 
To be sure, governments do not tackle the challenges of measurement alone. 
Academia, civil society and international organizations often help: 
   
- The Afro- and Latino-barometers are independent, nonpartisan research 
projects that record experiential data through population-based surveys 
throughout these regions.  
- UNICEF helps governments collect national data on birth registration and 
legal identity.   
- UNODC supports national data collection around homicides and 
conviction rates in more than 80 countries.   
- The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the 
World Bank are working with the g7+ to develop ways to measure justice 
and security across many of the world’s fragile states. 
 
Because a single indicator is often insufficient, governments and academics are 
increasingly creating baskets of indicators that capture progress across different 
dimensions through various data sources: 
  
- Administrative indicators document government effort and inputs;  
- Objective indicators identify broad trends over time;  
- Experience and perception indicators, typically gathered through 
surveys, ensure that the real experiences of people inform overall 
assessments.   
 
In support of its governance goal in its existing MDG national plan, the Government 
of Mongolia has adopted a basket of indicators approach including the following 
four:  
 
 Government performance in the Human Development Index; 
 Expert evaluation of the conformity of Mongolian laws and regulations with 
international human rights treaties and conventions; 
 Public perception of the political, economic, and financial independence of 
mass media; and 
 The Number of state organizations that regularly place reports of their 
budgets and expenditures on their websites.  
 
Other G7+ countries including Timor Leste, Solomon Islands, Liberia, and Somalia 
are also developing baskets of indicators to track progress across a range of 
peacebuilding and state-building goals.  These include: 
  
 The number of violent deaths per 100,000; and  
 Public confidence in the performance of justice systems—both formal and 
customary—including human rights mechanisms.   
  
7 REMARKS TO UNGA   
 
In short, many governments now recognize that experiential and perception data 
are valuable tools to help them target programs for effective service delivery.   
 
 
Conclusion 
 
Over the last fifteen years the MDGs have enabled us to make progress as a global 
community towards reducing extreme poverty.   
 
By including justice and the rule of law in the next development agenda, we can do 
even better.  
 
Specific targets and measurable indicators are available.  
 
It’s time to put them to use. Thank you.   
 
   


Justice for Development: integrating justice and human rights into the post-2015 development framework