The importance of goal 16
Goal 16 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals includes a commitment to the provision of ‘access to justice for all’. James Sandbach looks at its background and explains why it is significant for UK campaigners.
Goal 16 recognises that justice requires not just investment in state institutions and respect for human rights, but organisation and engagement by the people themselves.
In a speech to the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, leading the British delegation to the UN’s 70th session of the General Assembly, prime minister David Cameron said: ‘Let’s be frank about what keeps so many stuck in poverty. Corruption. Rotten government. No access to justice.’
The context, of course, was the international community’s adoption, via UN Resolution A/RES/70/1 (‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’), of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the successors to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Of the 17 global goals for sustainable development that came into effect on 1 January 2016, goal 16 commits to the provision of ‘access to justice for all’ as well as to promoting ‘peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development’ and building ‘effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels’. The resolution adopting the SDGs was part of a broader intergovernmental agreement around the Post-2015 Development Agenda, building on the principles agreed under previous resolutions from 2012 on ‘The future we want’ (UN Resolution A/RES/66/288) and the Rio+20 summit.
Targets
Sitting behind the SDGs are a set of specific targets, 169 in all, to be achieved by all countries over the next 15 years, along with implementation expectations and measurement frameworks or indicators. Goal 16’s targets include:
•ensuring access to justice as part of the promotion of the rule of law at national and international levels;
•ensuring public access to information;
•ensuring responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels;
•developing effective, accountable and transparent institutions; and
•ensuring legal identity for all.
It is notable that, while the MDGs were often criticised for failing to address the importance of the rule of law, the SDGs put justice and good governance at the centre of development policy. Underpinning discussions behind the framing of goal 16 has been the recognition that reducing violence and corruption, improving security with the rule of law, and creating inclusive and effective institutions to deliver justice and public services are essential preconditions for sustainable development and eradication of global poverty. Indeed, it has been described by the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development as ‘the transformational goal and key to ensuring that the Agenda can be accomplished’.
1www.fdsd.org/ideas/sustainable-development-goal-sdg-16-democratic-institutions/The inclusion of access to justice within the SDGs resulted from a long campaign by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) highlighting how land seizures without redress, judicial corruption, torture and trialless detention, statelessness, denial of basic rights to healthcare and citizenship all stand in the way of sustainable development. With an estimated four billion people living outside the reach of the law and without legal power and protection – mostly because they are poor – the links are obvious (see
Incorporating justice in the Post-2015 Development Framework, Namati factsheet).
2https://namati.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/fact-sheet-incorporating-justice-2015.pdf The question I would like to pose is: what relevance may goal 16 have for UK policy-makers at a time when we are seeing the scaling back of the court system (especially county and magistrates’ courts in rural areas), the ongoing impact of restrictions to the scope of legal aid services and consequent advice centre closures, increased numbers of litigants in person, ever greater inflation in court fee levels, and barriers put in the way of judicial reviews and appeal rights?
I don’t want to overplay the idea of goal 16 as some kind of precise metric against which all Ministry of Justice decisions should be benchmarked on an elaborate sustainability consultant’s grid. Indeed, the indicators being developed by the UN Statistical Commission don’t extend to our specific issues of litigants in person, distance from court by public transport, or public funding for free advice or judicare schemes. In any event, as Professor Amartya Sen has said, reducing goal 16 to anaemic indicators ‘is like trying to cancel the French Revolution because liberté, égalité and fraternité couldn’t be precisely measured’ (UNU-WIDER 30th anniversary conference, 25 September 2015). There is, however, much about goal 16 that I believe we can use in the UK to further the objectives of access to justice campaigners and hold the government to account.
Goal 16 in the UK
David Cameron is absolutely right to associate lack of access to justice with poverty, but that association also exists in the UK. Experience of, or inability to resolve, legal problems is, by all evidence-based indicators from the civil and social justice survey research, associated with outcomes of poverty and social exclusion (Pleasence et al,
Causes of action: civil law and social justice, 2nd edn, Legal Services Commission, 2006). Curiously, in a meeting in Bangkok last October of the UN Statistical Commission’s Inter-agency and Expert Group tasked with fleshing out the SDG indicators and data metrics, the UK representative questioned the whole feasibility of measuring citizen perceptions and experience of justice problems and institutions, not appearing to grasp that it has been UK academics who have pioneered legal needs analysis over the past two decades and have now exported this approach across the globe.
3http://unstats.un.org/sdgs/meetings/iaeg-sdgs-meeting-02 As stated in
Paths to justice: a past, present and future roadmap (Centre for Empirical Legal Studies/Nuffield Foundation, August 2013): ‘Since the mid-1990s, at least 26 large-scale national surveys of the public’s experience of justiciable problems have been conducted in at least 15 separate jurisdictions, reflecting widespread legal aid reform activity. Twenty-four of these surveys fall within a growing
Paths to justice tradition, having firm roots in, and following the structure of, Genn’s landmark survey in England and Wales’ (p60).
This apparent disconnect between the UK’s domestic and international approach towards access to justice becomes all the more stark when you look at how the government has been an active advocate for the SDGs and the inclusion of justice within them; indeed, David Cameron co-chaired the high-level panel that shaped the Post-2015 Development Agenda. This has been more than mere rhetoric for the UK’s leading politicians; in the last parliament, the government took a strong lead in legislating to ring-fence in public finances the UN’s target proportion of 0.7 per cent GDP for the overseas aid budget and in ensuring this commitment was funded. This move was a great achievement for the NGOs that lobbied for it and the politicians who championed it on a cross-party basis. However, over the same period that the political narrative was changed to secure the future of overseas aid, legal aid in the UK, and most especially in England and Wales, has, by contrast, taken one hell of a battering, both as a concept and as a public spending priority.
The SDGs put justice at the centre of development policy.
Goal 16 and its targets in full
Goal 16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
16.1 Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere
16.2 End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children
16.3 Promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and ensure equal access to justice for all
16.4 By 2030, significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows, strengthen the recovery and return of stolen assets and combat all forms of organised crime
16.5 Substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all their forms
16.6 Develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels
16.7 Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels
16.8 Broaden and strengthen the participation of developing countries in the institutions of global governance
16.9 By 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration
16.10 Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements
16.a Strengthen relevant national institutions, including through international co-operation, for building capacity at all levels, in particular in developing countries, to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime
16.b Promote and enforce nondiscriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development
Perhaps there is something that access to justice and legal campaigners can learn from the international development sector, especially its focus on the ‘capability approach’ to human development, pioneered by Amartya Sen, that has been extensively deployed by the UN Development Programme as a broader, deeper alternative to narrowly economic metrics such as growth in GDP per capita. Shifting the focus from legal needs to legal capabilities is already proving to be an effective way of reframing the access to justice debate; Law for Life’s report on Legal needs, legal capability and the role of public legal education (8 December 2015) does this very effectively, analysing how unevenly distributed profiles of legal capability in the population correlate with other aspects of personal capability, and how well-targeted, dynamic and engaging public legal education (PLE) interventions can improve personal empowerment and confidence. It is hoped that the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Public Legal Education can build a dialogue with policy makers on these issues to give a greater priority to PLE and to refocus justice policy reforms on the capability of individuals and communities in solving everyday legal issues.
Goal 16 can help us in making that case as it recognises that justice requires not just investment in state institutions and respect for human rights, but organisation and engagement by the people themselves – ‘participatory decision-making’, to use the language of the goal’s targets. The goal has already proven to be useful in other countries, for example the push to deliver a Legal Aid Bill in Kenya. Most importantly, though, we have an opportunity to talk about access to justice in a different way and a global context and, who knows, perhaps we can look forward to a time when our politicians finally commit to a GDP figure for investing in access to justice. ■