Court Administration and Reform

International experience shows that the sustainable consolidation of democracy and the rule of law requires an effective judiciary. A democratic system is composed of public institutional mechanisms open to citizen input serving the purpose of translating social preferences into public policies. These public policies, embodied in laws and regulations, must be subject to interpretation and enforcement by the judicial system. The rule of law requires governments to bind themselves by laws, while every person should be treated with equal rights within a judicial system that is feasibly accessible. As a result, democracy and the rule of law both require effective penal and civil courts. For the judiciary to perform these roles effectively, courts need to be accountable for their performance, while also enjoying a strong degree of independence for judicial appointments and within financial and disciplinary domains.

Many developed and developing countries have attempted to reform their judiciaries as an element of their political and social efforts to strengthen democracy, to enhance the protections of human rights, and to foster private investment. Comparative analysis demonstrates that these court reforms have shown mixed results. Limited judicial capacity is the common denominator in all judicial reforms worldwide in which serious impediments to enhancing public sector governance and economic growth exist.

An effective judiciary must offer equal and feasible access to its courts, regardless of a person's ethnic origin, gender, or socioeconomic level, while providing consistent and predictable remedies for those redressing grievances before the courts. If barriers to the judicial system, caused by backlog or corruption, seriously affect dispute resolution opportunities for citizens and businesses, one can then anticipate greater social and political conflict. Social interaction becomes more difficult and disputes become more costly. Moreover, public perception of penal court ineffectiveness and corruption will also grow whenever they experience increasing and unjustifiable backlogs and delays.

Empirical evidence shows that specific factors contribute to a low quality of court services around the world. Low-quality courts tend to lack one or more of the following characteristics: (1) safeguards against politicized, meritless appointments; (2) court and case management systems; (3) modern court administrative practices, such as avoiding a high burden of administrative tasks falling on judges themselves; (4) quality control standards applied to work performed by judges and court personnel; (5) proper requirements for career promotions; (6) steady funding for capital budgets allocated to training, infrastructure, and technologies; and (7) a practical model against which to assess the character and psychological suitability of those applying for a judicial position.

Countries correctly addressing these problem areas have shown relative success in improving court performance. For example, Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica, Singapore, and South Africa stand out as best-practice countries. Nevertheless, failures of judicial reforms during the implementation stage abound. Despite huge sums of money spent on higher salaries and additional staff in a majority of the countries sampled in recent studies, the persistence of pernicious incentives faced by judges and court personnel are still at the heart of the problems linked to court ineffectiveness and rampant corruption.

To enhance court performance, states have implemented judicial reforms through a mix of national and international efforts. These focus on areas such as drafting improved codes better to address substantive legal matters, for example, reforming criminal codes. Second, states establish better systems to hire and train court personnel and police forces as well as link periodic technical proficiency evaluations of court personnel to merit-based career paths. Third, they establish an improved system to hire more and better prosecutors and public defenders. Fourth, they modernize court administration and management, including their judiciaries' ability to install improved budget and planning systems [Page 308]and up-to-date case processing and management styles. This would entail reducing the administrative burden within the judges' domain by shifting responsibility to professional administrators. Fifth, states enhance the role of civil society in fostering improvements in court performance. Sixth, they establish systems of internal and external controls to foster consistent, predictable, and unbiased judicial rulings. Finally, they support alternative dispute resolution mechanisms.

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