Legal empowerment & access to justice
Investigating the links between access to justice and governance factors: anobjective indicators’ approach
Links between poverty and access to justice
Authors:
E Buscaglia,
Publisher:
Regional Bureau for Arab States, United Nations Development Programme , 2001
This paper seeks to identify the links between access to justice and poverty by using case study analysis. It also identifies governance related factors blocking the poor people’s access to justice.
The authors assess the nature of these links through the study of three cases that describe and analyse the patterns of demand for formal and informal mechanisms to resolve disputes by samples of the rural population in Colombia’s Andean Region—where 70 percent of the nation’s population lives.
Two rural areas have been selected for this study: Pauna and San Pablo de Borbur. These two municipal jurisdictions have been experiencing relatively low levels of violence and guerrilla activity compared to the rest of the Andean Region. These two regions are compared to a third Colombian rural area (Socha) where neither formal nor informal effective mechanisms to resolve disputes are currently functional.
The paper focuses on two main analytical aspects:
- the economic impact of dispute resolution mechanisms on the average rural family’s economic net worth. This section has strong implications addressing the links between dispute resolution mechanisms and poverty levels; and
- the governance-related roots of the problems affecting formal vis a vis informal dispute resolution mechanisms.
The study introduces a methodology where the links between access to justice, governance-related factors, and the impact on the poor can be identified and assessed. This methodology can be applied in any other context or country through the use of objective and perceptional survey indicators.
