Background Paper: Comparing Access to Justice

This paper is divided into four main sections: - The first section presents working definitions of terms that are essential to a better and deeper understanding of "access to justice". - Four concepts will be dealt with in greater detail for this initial part, namely: (1) access to justice; (2) transitional countries; (3) actors; and, (4) mechanisms. The second and most significant section provides a summary of the status of access to justice in the selected Asian and European transitional countries. A compendium of individual country templates that highlight the status of access to justice vis-à-vis the constitutional and legal bases is featured in this part. - The third section showcases limited illustrative case studies that would draw attention to the experience of actors in transitional countries in relation to access to justice, namely, in Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, China, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Portugal, Estonia, Spain, Greece and Germany. These case studies will be shown from different perspectives of actors coming from various settings. These studies will be complemented by an enumeration of existing mechanisms (local, regional and international) that have been put in place to help achieve access to justice in transitional countries. - The fourth section features a partial bibliography listing of related literature and an appendix that lists down the pertinent glossary of international organisations used for this report.