By George Soros and Gunilla Carlsson
The writers are, respectively, chairman of the Open Society Foundations and the Swedish minister for international development co-operation
Development agenda must include measurable targets for rule of law, write George Soros and Gunilla Carlsson
What do we want the world to be like in 2030? It will certainly be more crowded, with another billion people expected to take the planet’s population above 8bn. But will millions of our fellow humans still be living in extreme poverty, barely scraping enough together to keep themselves and their families alive?
A new report delivered to the UN secretary-general at the end of May argues that we can eradicate extreme poverty altogether by 2030. The 27-member panel – of which one of us is a member – has taken a big step forward; it has recognised that justice, human rights, and the rule of law are weapons as powerful as education, healthcare and housing in the war against poverty.
Why? Because an estimated 4bn people live outside the protection of the law, mostly because they are poor. They can easily be cheated by employers, driven from their land, preyed upon by the powerful and intimidated by violence. But in places where people can access justice, they are pulling themselves out of poverty and into better lives.
In the Philippines, for example, farming communities with access to legal help saw higher levels of productivity, higher farm incomes, and more investment in their farms. In India, slum dwellers who used legal assistance to file Right to Information claims secured ration cards for subsidised food with more success than people who went it alone. Ninety-four per cent of people who filed claims got a ration card within a year, compared with only 21 per cent who did not file claims. In Sierra Leone, just 75 paralegals placed throughout the country help people resolve more than 10,000 legal cases a year. These cases include everything from resolving a contract dispute stalling the drilling of a village well to securing compensation from international mining companies that have damaged community lands. Access to the law removes the obstacles that make development impossible.
The connection between justice and development is not a new idea. But justice was left out of the UN’s millennium development goals in 2001 because it was considered too hard to measure. This was a mistake. The new report, spearheaded by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Liberian president, and David Cameron, UK prime minister, tried to correct course by arguing that the world must now “go beyond the MDGs”.
The report is right. The MDGs have helped bring real change; extreme poverty rates have halved since 1990. But there are 1.2bn people they have failed to reach. Studying the remaining areas of extreme poverty reveals a common theme – the absence of justice, in the form of discrimination, exclusion, oppression. That’s why the new development agenda must incorporate measurable targets for justice.
We know what these might look like. Indeed the report itself outlines potential goals and targets on good governance and peaceful societies to show that measuring justice and the rule of law is possible. The good governance goal, for example, includes targets seeking “free and universal legal identity” – such as birth registrations – and an aim to reduce bribery and bring corrupt officials to account. More work needs to be done on building up the metrics.
Ahead lies the even greater challenge of getting the 190 members of the UN General Assembly to embrace the idea of development goals focused on good governance and transparency, notions that in too many countries are too often honoured in the breach.
Those governments need to hear now from their own people that this is an opportunity too great to miss
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