Evaluating Judicial Reform Projects Funded by the International Donors in the Middle East

            1. Problem

            Judicial reform has been on the agenda for the international community and various Western governmental institutions with respect to their policies toward the Middle East. Judicial reform has been viewed as a prominent focus of the greater project of Middle East reform that pursues democracy and development assistance. Although there are some differences between the European Union and the American reform projects for the Middle East reform, they both share judicial reform as one of their foci. USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and MEPI (Middle East Partnership Initiative) have chosen to work in areas such as civil society, local government, judicial reform, and women’s rights that seemed the easiest and least sensitive. The U.S., the EU, the UN, and the World Bank have undertaken numerous initiatives to promote legal and judicial reforms, most of them are working at the national level in areas such as judicial training, judicial administration, and legal code reform. A G-8 initiative tried to complement these efforts by focusing at the grassroots community level to establish and fund centers at which individuals can access legal advice on civil, criminal, or Sharia law, and contact defense attorneys which are very uncommon in the region.

   There has been some effort to launch judicial reform in the region, from different research and reform implementation projects to high ranking U.S judiciary official’s visit to the region to launch a regional judicial reform effort. The big chunk of the Middle Eastern democracy assistance goes to programs in Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. Some of the democracy programs in Egypt supported judicial reform.  Elsewhere in the region, numerous smaller-scale programs focused on judicial reform in Yemen, Morocco, Jordan and Oman. Other than special countries, there have been projects which address the whole Middle East and North Africa region. European Commission has sponsored some projects to support Turkey’s judiciary and its prison system and reform them

   These projects have aimed at developing an independent, competent, and professional judicial system within high ethic standards for effective dispute resolution, and, to facilitate commercial transactions. These projects have framed the judicial reform in the region and by doing this have limited the perspective for alternative promotion of policies.

   The question now is that whether these projects have exposed the Middle Eastern government officials to new ways of doing things, if they have helped them to keep beleaguered human rights and democracy organizations afloat, whether they have created new spaces for dialogue and debate and injected discussion of political liberalization into the public discourse. To answer these questions, we need to evaluate these projects in terms of relevance and performance.

2.  Questions

How are the existing judicial systems and judicial reform projects interacting? What is the role of lawyers, judges, legal NGOs, bar associations and judiciary officials in implementation of judicial reform projects? Which groups do participate in the process of implementation of these projects? Does some of the public's criticism of these projects stem from use of foreign and international funds? Have these projects raised the standards of judicial services and judicial decision making? Have the different branches of government in countries under discussion been cooperative? Are these projects addressing the most necessary reforms in the countries under discussion? What have been the most important obstacles for implementation of these projects? Whom these projects are directed to? What institutions do these projects work with? These questions are significant for policy makers and donors.

3. Purpose of the Study

Given the lack of current research on the role of judicial reform projects sponsored by the international donors in rule of law promotion, democratization process and economic development in the Middle East, I believe this study will make several contributions. First, it offers an opportunity to construct a model containing important features of the Middle Eastern judicial systems. Second, organizing the raw qualitative and quantitative data will permit comparisons to be made between the countries with respect to their judiciaries. Finally, systematic study of the judicial reform projects promises important insights into the factors that constitute the fundamentals of the judicial reform policy making in the Middle Eastern countries which receive contributions of international donors and its generalizability as an appropriate model for the whole region. 

  Answering the research questions will help us to 1) have a better picture of judicial reform projects in the Middle East and the necessity of selecting different paths to judicial reform as an important feature of rule of law reform, 2) evaluate the different projects of judicial reform based on their efficiency and outcomes, 3) and categorize the perspectives of future judicial reforms in the region.

   Having these insights and explanations in mind, my International Policy Fellowship research focuses on recommending policies for more effective judicial reform projects in the Middle East. The specific objectives of the project are as follows:

• To increase understanding about the foundations and structures of the past and existing judicial reform projects in the Middle Eastern societies
• To analyze the evaluations and criticisms of the civil society (i.e. legal NGOs and mass media) institutions with respect to these projects
• To highlight lessons learned from previous judicial reform projects in the region, to improve the quality of judicial reforms that are going to be implemented, and to provide recommendations for further judicial reforms in the region
•  To identify means to facilitate greater effectiveness of international efforts to promote rule of law, especially with reference to the Middle Eastern societies, and
• To develop a policy paper on strategies that enhance the effectiveness of judicial reform projects in the Middle East, advance public debate on the reform policy, and devise policy recommendations for future strategies.

Anyone in the capacity to influence the process of judicial decision making in the region, whether abroad or inside the country, is the possible participant and consumer of this research.

4. Methodology

Considering the constraints of time, money, professional conditions, and/or expertise and a lack of established consensus on indicators of judicial best practice, a two-tiered approach to performance indicators will be adopted to assess the judicial reform projects in terms of their processes and their impacts: process indicators which measure the implementation of a development project in terms of its efficiency and effort, and impact indicators which measure the effectiveness of project outputs in terms of their results or outcomes. Process indicators are “internal” to the project and evaluate whether it is doing what it set out to do, while impact indicators are “external” to the project, and describe objectively visible measures and how they contribute to enhancing the rule of law environment. A more visible and objective indicator of project impact is judicial performance. Key criteria for judicial performance relate to changes in the nature and incidence of judicial caseload and service-delivery. I will use the results of assessments of public satisfaction with judicial services.

   The need to increase local participation in and ownership of aid programs lead us to suggest that evaluation of judicial reform projects results should also be conducted according to a participatory model. The participatory model involves stakeholders from the recipient country in identifying their own indicators of success and developing their own model for judicial reform. The principal benefit of this strategy is that it engages the recipients directly in the task of assessing of the value of an aid intervention.

  A number of techniques are introduced to be used to collect data for purposes of evaluating the intervention. They would be

§         Comparative surveys – self, peer and external assessment

§         Interviews of key stakeholders and representatives of civil society

§         Observation and expert appraisal

§         Base-line judicial management data

I will do interviews with key stakeholders and donors and observation and expert appraisal because their results could be easily used in a policy oriented project. The limited budget and time of the project will not let me to do comparative surveys and gather judicial management data. 

   It may be asked why judicial reform projects in Egypt and Turkey have been chosen for this study. I will only focus Egypt and Turkey for these reasons: 1) the region includes about 15 countries and in a study that should be done in one year I cannot cover all of them; 2) some of the countries like Egypt and Turkey have a longer history of judicial reform, state building and democratization; 3) these countries are the most powerful countries in the region and will have influence on others politically and socially. Egypt and Turkey have been historically and ideologically leading others in political and social developments. Turkey and Egypt have been vanguard in this respect; 4) most of the judicial projects in the region have been focused on these two countries; AND 5) these countries, although in the same region, are very different: Turkey has tried to respond positively to expedite the process of joining to the European Union while Egypt has not been under this kind of pressure; Turkey is not part of the Arab world while Egypt is a leading country in this world.

5. Research Strategy

My strategies for achieving the above objectives include:

-            Reviewing the past and existing judicial reform projects funded by the international donors

-            Reviewing the contributions of receiving countries in these projects

-       Comparing the projects under study with respect to their objects, priorities and implementations and outlining their pros and cons with respect to judicial reform.

-             Working with legal NGOs and judicial associations to understand their concerns about these projects

-           Selecting small groups of legal and judicial experts from a wider population to shape the focus groups to understand their members' opinions about these projects

        -            Interviewing key players and relevant stakeholders at different levels of legal and judicial affairs to produce a set of recommendations for the                 donors and future judicial reform projects

The support of the International Policy Fellowship program, both in terms of financial assistance and of contacts across the professional policy networks, would facilitate the fulfillment of the goals of the planned qualitative research, of the critical analysis of judicial reform projects and of defining feasible policy recommendations.