Explore Data of Countries
Find out how people in different countries around the world experience justice. What are the most serious problems people face? How are problems being resolved? Find out the answers to these and more.
*GP – general population; *HCs – host communities; IDPs* – internally displaced persons
Justice Services
Innovation is needed in the justice sector. What services are solving justice problems of people? Find out more about data on justice innovations.
The Gamechangers
The 7 most promising categories of justice innovations, that have the potential to increase access to justice for millions of people around the world.
Justice Innovation Labs
Explore solutions developed using design thinking methods for the justice needs of people in the Netherlands, Nigeria, Uganda and more.
Creating an enabling regulatory and financial framework where innovations and new justice services develop
Rules of procedure, public-private partnerships, creative sourcing of justice services, and new sources of revenue and investments can help in creating an enabling regulatory and financial framework.
Forming a committed coalition of leaders
A committed group of leaders can drive change and innovation in justice systems and support the creation of an enabling environment.
Problems
Find out how specific justice problems impact people, how their justice journeys look like, and more.
The Justice Gap in Tunisia is considerable. Forty percent of the Tunisians have to deal with one or more legal problems every four years. This amounts to around 1.17 million legal problems every year. Most likely this is a conservative estimate of the existing needs for justice.
Such a gap calls for radical transformation in the delivery of justice. We call such transformation – People Centered Justice.
A legal problem is a problem that takes place in daily life – a dispute, disagreement or grievance for which there is a resolution in the (formal or informal) law. It does not matter if the individual sees it as legal or whether she took action to resolve it.
The chart shows how many adults in Tunisia encountered one or more legal problems in the last 4 years.
Ethiopia is home to at least 117 million people. The country is the second most populous country in Africa, after Nigeria. Ethiopia has one of the fastest growing economies in East Africa. Around 57% of the total population is aged 15 or above. Ethiopia has one of the largest populations of refugees and asylum seekers in the world. UNHCR estimates that as of 2022 the country is hosting 840 000 persons of concern.
What the study shows is that every 4 years 22 Million people need to deal with legal problems. Some of them encounter multiple issues. On an annual basis this amounts to 7.41 million people who need protection from the law to resolve a legal problem. This is 2.5 times more than the reported malaria cases.
A gap this big means that from every 100 000 people there are 13 000 individuals who must cope with one or more legal problems.
Land is the biggest cause of justice needs in Ethiopia. Of all people who had to deal with a legal problem, 38% have to deal with a land dispute. 26% encountered crime and 15% experienced a family problem. To put this into context we extrapolate these proportions to the general population. This means that we take the findings from the randomly selected sample and project them into the general population. Every year in Ethiopia there are:
Land disputes, crimes, disputes between neighbours, family disputes, domestic violence and money-related problems are the most commonly encountered categories. Different people from different groups, however, encounter different types of justice needs. Women for instance have to deal with more problems around family and domestic violence. Crime is the top category for young Ethiopians. In the cities, there are more problems around money, employment and housing than in rural areas.
The sheer number of legal problems tells us about the size of the demand but is not enough to establish the justice gap. There might be many or few legal problems in society. The metric that really matters is whether these problems are converted into fair resolutions that help people to continue with their lives.
In Ethiopia, every year 282K problems are partially resolved. 2.3M are in a process of resolution and 1.9 are not resolved at all!
Given the size of the gap, it is clear that the usual approaches (such as training judges, building new court rooms or improving legislation) are not going to work. A People-centered justice transformation is needed!
A lot of justice in Ethiopia takes place at community level. Read our report on Community justice in Ethiopia.
This distribution tells us about the market for justice. Where to people “vote with their feet”? The market size also tells us where justice can be improved. Clearly, a lot of justice takes place at community level of Ethiopia. Great processes at that level could be a “game changer”. Imagine if an accessible procedure helps to resolve in more fair manner the numerous problems with land that people encounter? Immediately hundreds of thousands, even millions of people will benefit from better justice.
This distribution tells us about the market for justice. Where to people “vote with their feet”? The market size also tells us where justice can be improved. Clearly, a lot of justice takes place at community level of Ethiopia. Great processes at that level could be a “game changer”. Imagine if an accessible procedure helps to resolve in more fair manner the numerous problems with land that people encounter? Immediately hundreds of thousands, even millions of people will benefit from better justice.
Which problems should be addressed first? The justice gap is enormous and policy makers and service providers must focus the limited resource where impact is most needed. We developed a simple mechanism to rank the burden of the legal problems. To calculate the burden we combine the impact and the prevalence (frequency) of the problems. The combination shows which problems are serious and frequent at the same time. Impact and prevalence vary across key socio-demographic variables. Therefore in the chart below we let the users play make their own selections to see what are the most burdensome problems for specific groups.
The Justice Dashboard is powered by HiiL. We deliver user-friendly justice. For information about our work, please visit www.hiil.org
The Hague Institute for
Innovation of Law
Tel: +31 70 762 0700
E-mail: info@hiil.org