Professors Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer co-author OECD Guide to Legal Needs Surveys and Access

Professor Pascoe Pleasence, Professor of Empirical Legal Studies, and Professor Nigel Balmer, Professor of Law and Social Statistics at UCL Laws, have co-authored a guide which aims to support countries in implementing legal and justice services, called ‘Legal Needs Surveys and Access to Justice’.

The Guide's main aim is enabling countries to implement people-centred legal and justice services, through better understanding, and through measuring and monitoring progress. In the Guide’s foreword, James Goldston, Executive Director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, and Marcos Bonturi, Director of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Public Governance Directorate explain that the Guide further aims to enable effective implementation of target 16.3 of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (launched in September 2015): 'to promote the rule of law at the national and international levels and to ensure equal access to justice for all’. Additionally, the Guide aims to support implementation of the OECD Policy Framework for Policy Action on Inclusive Growth, published in May 2018.

The guide has been two years in production, with input provided by a range of stakeholders including the OECD, Open Society Justice Initiative, the UNDP, the World Bank, the World Justice Project, Statistics South Africa, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, Argentina, the National Institute of Statistics, Cape Verde, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico, the National Planning Department, Colombia, the Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales and the Hague Institute for Innovation in Law.

The guide will be available soon on the OECD website.