Measuring Access to Justice: Transformation and Technicality in SDG 16.3
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12597 |
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
Measuring Access to Justice: Transformation
and Technicality in SDG 16.3
Margaret L. Satterthwaite and Sukti Dhital
NYU School of Law, New York, USA
Abstract
Billions of people around the world live at the margins –pushed or kept out, often in silence, without adequate protection of
the law. Denied healthcare, citizenship or fair pay, those unprotected by the law have problems that are both real and relent-
less, impacting their ability to reap the benefits of sustainable development. Despite this crushing reality, access to justice is a
bedrock principle undergirding human rights. Despite its centrality, justice was not explicitly included in the Millennium Devel-
opment Goals (MDGs). This omission was corrected when the SDGs were adopted with a stand-alone goal on justice. While
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 was the result of years of political, strategic and scholarly work by human rights
advocates, development practitioners and academics, its promise lies beyond the technocratic realms of development pro-
gramming, by insisting that people’s own experience of justice –and injustice –must remain at the center of efforts to assess
progress toward a world where no one is ‘left behind’.
Billions of people around the world live at the margins –
pushed or kept out, often in silence, without adequate pro-
tection of the law. Denied healthcare, citizenship or fair pay,
those unprotected by the law have problems that are both
real and relentless, impacting their ability to reap the bene-
fits of sustainable development.
Despite this crushing reality, access to justice is a bedrock
principle undergirding human rights (CLEP, 2008). The Uni-
ted Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has described
access to justice as ‘a basic human right as well as an indis-
pensable means to combat poverty, prevent and resolve
conflicts’(UNDP, 2004, p. 3). Under international human
rights law, all people have the right to access justice without
discrimination and states must take positive steps to make
this promise real for all (CLEP, 2008; UNGA, 2012a). Despite
its centrality, justice was not explicitly included in the Mil-
lennium Development Goals (MDGs) framework. This omis-
sion was corrected in September 2015 when the UN
General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), through which the global community pledged
to promote sustainable development and to ensure access
to justice for all by 2030 (Goal 16) (UN, n.d.; UNGA, 2015).
The inclusion of a stand-alone goal on justice was hard-won,
and the framing of a target on access to justice was no
easier. While SDG 16 was the result of years of political,
strategic and scholarly work by human rights advocates,
development practitioners and academics, its promise lies
beyond the technocratic realms of development program-
ming, by insisting that people’s own experience of justice –
and injustice –must remain at the center of efforts to assess
progress toward a world where no one is ‘left behind’.
Through a mix of interviews with key experts and docu-
mentary research, this paper reflects on the process leading
up to the adoption of the criminal justice indicators for SDG
16.3, while also looking ahead to the possibilities for inclu-
sion of a more transformative civil justice indicator. The fol-
lowing section of the paper examines the development of
Goal 16 and its target on access to justice. The third section
provides an overview of the 16.3 indicator adoption process,
describing important contestations that led to the cabining
of access to justice through the privileging of criminal jus-
tice indicators and the discounting of civil justice metrics, a
process that carried discursive and substantive conse-
quences. The fourth section examines the dynamics that led
to the rejection of a civil justice indicator, including data
inertia resulting in the rejection of new methodologies and
forms of data collection, institutional positioning, and the
availability of resources. The next section unpacks the future
potential for inclusion of an access to civil justice indicator,
contending that what is needed is a global commitment to
support a holistic indicator that captures legal needs and
represents access to justice from the people’s perspective.
The final section concludes.
Advancing justice: The development of goal 16
In 2010, the General Assembly held a High-level Plenary
Meeting on the MDGs to take stock of progress, catalyze
political will to push through obstacles, and begin discus-
sions about the development framework that would replace
the MDGs in 2015 (UN, 2010). The framework sought to
build upon the success of the MDGs through a broad and
inclusive process, which at times led to competing UN bod-
ies, NGO coalitions and streams of work (Kumar et al., 2016;
Langford, 2016). The development of the SDGs proceeded
roughly along two tracks: a political process explicitly
focused on goals and targets; and a technical process
devoted to indicators and statistics. These tracks often
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:Suppl.1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12597
Global Policy Volume 10 . Supplement 1 . January 2019
96
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