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The Justice Rising Blog aims to highlight grassroots organizations who are striving to advance the rule of law. If you would like to highlight your organization, send us an email at [email protected]! Name of Organization: FLAC (Future Leader for Anti-Corruption) Indonesia Project Title: Laskar Anti Korupsi

Interest in informal legal systems has grown in recent years with greater emphasis being placed on local ownership as an effective means of development. Non-state justice systems, including indigenous, customary, and religious legal orders; alternative dispute resolution mechanisms; and popular justice fora are often the only avenues through which the masses can access justice. Customary justice systems (CJS) provide access to justice for marginalised or impoverished communities that may otherwise have no other options for redress.

A major arena for successful pro-poor rule of law reform has been the provision of secure land rights for the rural poor. The bulk of the 70-75% of the extreme poor on our planet who make their livelihood in the rural sector fall into one of three great groups (altogether around 1.25 billion people) who lack secure land rights: tenants or agricultural labourers on lands of private owners; members of collective farms who have not yet received secure individual land rights in a break-up; and squatters on land claimed under public ownership.

The Rule of Law Index is an invaluable tool for assessing conformance to the rule of law across the globe, but the index fails to measure an important indicator. Rule 5.1 specifies "the laws are publicized and accessible" as a key metric, echoing most classic formulations of the Rule of Law from Dicey's classic formulation to our modern era.

The 2012 Roderick B. Mathews Opportunity Fund competition was unlike any other. For the first time, the entire process took place online. Seeking to inject entrepreneurial creativity into rule of law reform efforts, the Opportunity Fund is the World Justice Project’s mechanism to provide direct funding and support to projects that strengthen the rule of law across the world.

The World Justice Project’s Honorary Chair Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is a Sudanese-born, British mobile communications tycoon, the founder of Celtel, and the chairman of Satya Capital and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

The capacity of national justice sector institutions to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes is one of the greatest challenges to national rule of law initiatives within the context of peace and security. Approximately 60% of States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) are yet to adapt their national legal framework to the cooperation requirements, crimes and modes of liability defined by the ICC Statute. Positive Complementarity is the most important conceptual insight to address this.

Laurie Conway's film seeks to highlight the importance of the rule of law by focusing on Lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa’s efforts in Zimbabwe. In spite of beatings by police, she has courageously defended in court those jailed by the Mugabe government—peace activists, journalists, opposition candidates, farmers that had their land confiscated, ordinary citizens that had the courage to speak up.

For many, the failures of the struggle against sexual crime translate into a daily, ongoing nightmare. The MILEAD Fellows of the Moremi Initiative for Women's Leadership in Africa stand in solidarity and sympathy with victims and survivors of these crimes all over the world, particularly the woman who so tragically lost her life following her brutal gang rape in New Delhi just recently. We choose not to be silent in the aftermath of this particular case precisely because it is geographically removed. We are all connected.

The crime of forced internal displacement is not a new phenomenon in Colombia. It has been a widespread practice in the country’s internal armed conflict for several decades. However, forced internal displacement cannot be reduced to an inherent or unintended effect of the conflict. The armed actors in the Colombian armed conflict—the army and its paramilitary groups, on one hand, and the guerrilla groups, on the other—have used the practice of forced displacement of civilian populations as part of their military strategies to take control of or maintain a presence in certain territories.

The 67th UN General Assembly recently adopted an unprecedented resolution emanating from its first-ever High-Level Meeting on the Rule of Law in September. For the first time in history, 193 Member States unanimously and explicitly linked the rule of law and development, stating:

A wave of protests has swept across the streets of Khartoum and other major cities in Sudan; adding to the long list of problems that are fundamentally challenging Omar al-Bashir and his 23-year old repressive regime.

Many Cambodian migrant workers abroad are employed in domestic work, that is, work carried out for an employer’s household, such as cooking, cleaning, looking after family members and other household tasks.  Malaysia is a major destination country for Cambodian migrant domestic workers (as well as migrant workers from other countries in the region), who are predominantly young women. 

Aside from being the most dynamic and populous region, Asia and the Pacific is a modern-day hub of people on the move in search of decent work. Some 25 million Asians are employed in countries other than their own. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the rate of Asian migration has been increasing. Since the beginning of the millennium, we’ve seen a clear acceleration of this trend.

On November 24, 2012, more than a hundred textile workers died when a factory in Bangladesh was engulfed in fire. Will this day haunt the 160 million Bangladeshis in the years to come? Unlikely. The country has faced numerous tragedies. While some were a result of natural disasters, most can be attributed to sheer negligence, lack of accountability and effective regulatory enforcement. Earlier in the year, a capsized ferry resulted in the death of 110 people. In July 2011, 40 school children were killed in a school bus accident.

"Democracy is not just about holding periodic elections…it is a way of life and the office of the “citizen” is its basic component" - Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani

Each year at this time—timed purposefully to coincide with International Anti-Corruption Day—Transparency International publishes its annual global ranking of the world’s countries based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be, the Corruption Perceptions Index.  Transparency International’s work to standardize cross-country corruption indicators such as the CPI was recognized recently in this blog as part of the “Rule of Law Measurement Revolutio

On 10th December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was followed up in 1950 when the Assembly passed resolution 423 (V) that invited all Member States and interested organisations to adopt 10thDecember as Human Rights Day.