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WJP Rule of Law Index® 2011 Report
Download the Index here
After four years of intensive development, testing, and vetting—including interviewing 66,000 people and over 2000 experts in 66 countries—The World Justice Project is ready to publicly release the second annual WJP Rule of Law Index® report.
The Index provides detailed information and original data regarding a variety of dimensions of the rule of law, which enables stakeholders to assess a nation’s adherence to the rule of law in practice, identify a nation’s strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other countries, and track changes over time.
The WJP Rule of Law Index® 2011 report, the second of an annual series, was released on June 13, 2011 in Washington, DC and presented at the World Justice Forum III in Barcelona.
The WJP Rule of Law Index® is an innovative quantitative risk assessment tool designed by The World Justice Project to offer a detailed and comprehensive picture of the extent to which countries adhere to the rule of law in practice. While other indices cover certain aspects of the rule of law, such as human rights, commercial law, or corruption, they do not yield a full picture of rule of law compliance. The WJP Rule of Law Index® is the first to treat the rule of law comprehensively.
The Index consists of 9 factors and 52 sub-factors, organized under the following set of four principles, or bands, which constitute the WJP’s definition of the rule of law:
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The government and its officials and agents are accountable under the law;
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The laws are clear, publicized, stable and fair, and protect fundamental rights, including the security of persons and property;
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The process by which the laws are enacted, administered and enforced is accessible, fair and efficient;
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Access to justice is provided by competent, independent, and ethical adjudicators, attorneys or representatives, and judicial officers who are of sufficient number, have adequate resources, and reflect the makeup of the communities they serve.
These principles are derived from a wide array of international sources, including the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, that enjoy broad acceptance across countries with vastly differing social, cultural, economic, and political systems. It has also been vetted in WJP meetings on five continents. A
statistical sensitivity and reliability analysis of the Index data was conducted by the Econometrics Unit of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
The first Index report was released in October and covered 35 countries. The Rule of Law Index expanded its coverage to 66 countries in 2011 and will expand to 100 countries by 2012.
WJP Rule of Law Index® 2010 Report
The World Justice Project publicly released the Rule of Law Index® 2010 report, covering 35 countries, in October 2010 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC (see videos
here). Several international wires, leading newspapers in over 35 countries, and scores of online news outlets and blogs have written about the Index’s findings, resulting in over 150 media mentions of the Index—and counting. Thousands of people have distributed stories on the Index via social media networks. Journalists around the world are already beginning to cite the Index as authoritative reference on rule of law-related issues.
The Index is also being cited by political leaders around the globeto corroborate their identification of strong and weak areas across rule of law dimensions in their countries. In October 2010, in his annual speech to the Colombian Judiciary, the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos,
used the Index findings to underscore the need to reform the Colombian criminal investigation system--a reform that has been lagging for 15 years.
In Singapore, while opening the Singaporean Legal New Year, Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong
referenced Singapore’s high Index scores in the area of access to civil justice. Chief Justice Chan and the new Attorney-General Sundaresh Menon also acknowledged two areas which need attention, namely the low number of Singapore lawyers practicing criminal law, and the need to have a greater focus on financial crimes.
Both these examples are realizations of the Index’s purpose design to be an action-oriented instrument to strengthen the rule of law.
