What are the German government’s priority areas for development activities in legal and judicial reform? This paper identifies two key criteria and intervention categories: the rule of law and legal certainty. It describes methods of assistance and different regional programmes, and outlines future priorities, including translating legal principles into legal practice and combining traditional and modern legal systems.
The rule of law and legal certainty are essential elements of sustainable poverty reduction. Principles of the rule of law provide the conditions for free personal development and contribute to democracy and peace. Establishing the rule of law is important for safeguarding global security. Legal certainty enables economic activity.
German development cooperation adopts a comprehensive approach from legislation to the application, implementation and enforcement of the law and acces to it. Solutions are developed jointly with partners, taking into account their specific needs and alternative models such as traditional law. An approach based on the continental European legal system of civil law may be more appropriate than the Anglo-Saxon tradition of common law due to the lack of stable public institutions in partner countries.
German development cooperation provides development assistance in the justice sector through bilateral and multilateral channels. Technical co-operation focuses on criminal law in Latin America, on commercial law in Asia and on diverse priorities in Africa. More general activity areas are:
- Support for implementing international human rights conventions.
- Gender equality and the protection of minorities, including reducing discrimination and improving access to justice.
- Legislation for a social market economy, such as property and labour law.
- Criminal procedure and penal law.
- Constitutional and administrative law, as well as other areas that support the advancement of democratic rights, such as electoral law.
- Cross-sector approaches. These include legal and judicial reforms to underpin crisis and conflict management, the fight against corruption, de-centralisation and environmental protection, among others.
In the future, legal and judicial reform will be integrated more closely with projects in the two priority areas of ‘democracy/civil society/public administration’ and ‘economic reform and development of the market system’. Other proposals are to:
- Link legal and judicial reform to other democracy promotion measures within wider development programmes.
- Use Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers as a framework to network more closely with other donors’ activities.
- Continue with reforms already under way, and step up measures to reform the judicial system and improve access to justice.
- Extend the focus of regional activities to include, for example, administrative law in Latin America and the rights of the individual in Eastern Europe and Asia.
- Establish legal and judicial systems in post-conflict regions, taking into account the political sensitivities of ethnic and other social conflicts.
- Expand approaches that apply and implement existing norms. This includes support for social institutions such as ombudsmen, new ways of dealing with pluralistic law systems and the use of information technology.
