August 31, 2004 - Washington DC. An international conference on improving governance in the Latin America and Caribbean region was held in Madrid last month. It was the culmination of a 10 week action-oriented learning program on Judicial Reform in the LAC region, using GDLN as a virtual classroom

The program was intended to strengthen and promote existing reform initiatives in the region by building on past accomplishments and enhancing their impact. It would also equip participants with the tools to formulate or review projects and facilitate the creation of coalitions and new strategic alliances.

Participants located in GDLN centers from Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay and Mexico identified as the major problems:

• deficiency in the investigations of corruption cases;
  
  
• lack of inter-institutional coordination;
  
  
• citizen’s lack of information about their rights;
  
  
• conflict of interests and influence of the political and economic elites;
  
  
• difficulty in the access to justice for vulnerable segments of society;
  
  
• bad relations between the media and the judiciary.
  

During the weeks ahead of the conference in Spain, participants from nine countries discussed key questions in the processes of judicial reform. Frannie Leautier, Vice President, WBI, Roberto Dañino, General Counsel and SVP of the Legal Department along with Ernesto May, Sector Director for PREM in LAC, launched the program in April. Dañino told the Madrid gathering via video conference that the participants “had not only succeeded in contributing to a greater understanding of the issues involved in judicial reform, but also had made very valuable contributions toward improving the way the Bank supports judicial reform activities.”

Dañino also announced the initiation of a consultative process to develop a new integrated Bank action plan for judicial reform that will be driven by three underlying principles: 1) continuous consultations with member countries; 2) a multidisciplinary and inter-sector approach; and 3) maximizing the Bank’s knowledge capacity and knowledge management in this area.

At the conference, country teams of professionals ranging from judges, prosecutors and attorneys, to academics, members of civil society and journalists, presented suggestions and concrete actions to be taken. For example:

• Peru would seek to improve access to justice by establishing free legal aid centers in the Ministry of Justice for defendants and complainants.
  
  
• Venezuela will aim to create a pilot mobile “house of justice” on a state level with justice agents in the community that could provide mediation, conciliation, information, orientation and legal aid services.
  
  
• The Dominican Republic would encourage the participation of civil society by appointing representatives of civil society and the private sector in the selection process of candidates for the Supreme Court of Justice.
  

The program was strongly supported by the donor community including, including the Spanish government. Bank participation reflected the collaboration of various units (WBI, LAC Public Sector, EXT, INT, PREM and Legal) with the common objective of providing support to the priorities identified by the country teams in the area of judicial reform.

Ronald Myers, LAC Sector Manager, Public Sector Group, stressed that the learning program was “most productive for counterparts in our projects. This tremendous effort involved bringing together the various departments in the Bank, project teams, and Spanish authorities. The program will hopefully lead to measurable positive impacts on the projects and the broader LJR process in LAC.”

Some of the most important and unresolved challenges discussed during the program and presented in the conclusions in Madrid were:

Some factors are common throughout the region, but system specific solutions require country focus knowledge and analytical institutional diagnostics to prioritize reforms, develop judicial performance indicators and measure the impact of the reforms.

Resolving disputes and reducing levels of conflict within a society means going beyond the focus on the pure court administration. Said Roberto Dañino, “Judicial reform is too important and too complex to leave in the hands of only lawyers. In my experience, successful judicial reform efforts require a multidisciplinary, flexible and integrated approach that can effectively assist our borrowing countries.”

Cross-national and cross regional experiences in different areas (corruption, human rights, access to justice, tackling the challenge of capture by the elite) will serve to determine where performance failures exist and why some systems are working better than others. As Leautier said in the opening session, judicial reform is a crucial area for development “as deficient judicial systems can derive in important costs for the economy of a country.”

The importance of recognizing the nexus between human rights, governance and development. Daniel Kaufmann, Director of WBI Global Programs provided an empirical framework to analyze this nexus and showed data suggesting how furthering some human rights is important for attaining socio-economic development.

The Executive Director for Spain, Per Kuroswki, spoke in support of the issue raised by the participants to strengthen the Bank’s agenda for governance and judicial reform. Institutions such as the Bank, IDB and other international organizations should take the agenda beyond traditional measures, he said.

For conference materials in Spanish, go here. See here for information on the LAC Legal and Judicial Reform Program in English.

For additional information regarding this activity, please contact María González de Asís at Mgonzalezasis@worldbank.org. To learn about future GDLN activities in Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (PREM) related topics, please contact Jorge Gamarra N. at the following e-mail address: jgamarranavarro@worldbank.org