A New CRRC-Georgia/PROLoG Report: Legal Professionals’ Views on the Legal System

CRRC-Georgia’s report The Judicial System in Georgia: Views of Legal Professionals was published on 11 July, 2016. The report details the results of a baseline study for the USAID-funded project Promoting Rule of Law in Georgia (PROLoG) implemented by East-West Management Institute (EWMI). The study evaluated how the following aspects of the justice system are seen by judges, prosecutors and private, NGO and Legal Aid Service (LAS) lawyers: 

1. Whether there is an effective balance between parties in law and practice;
2. Whether citizens, including minorities and vulnerable groups can benefit from the protection the justice system offers; 
3. The quality of legal education in Georgia;
4. How different judicial institutions perform.

During the survey, 310 lawyers (of which 204 private lawyers, 49 NGO lawyers and 57 LAS lawyers), 108 judges and 102 prosecutors were interviewed. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven judges and seven prosecutors and four focus-groups with private, NGO and LAS lawyers. 

Overall, prosecutors and judges tended to report the most positive views. The assessments of lawyers, and in particular NGO lawyers, were generally less positive compared to the assessments of prosecutors and judges. 

CRRC-Georgia’s researcher Mariam Kobaladze presents the main findings of the PROLoG report at the Frontline Georgia Club in Tbilisi on 11 July 2016. Photo by Mariam Sikharulidze. 

The main findings of the report are presented below:

Balance between Parties in Law and in Practice

• With regard to civil and administrative law, the majority of all legal professionals assess that the balance between parties is similar both in law and in practice, but more lawyers say that there is equality of arms neither in law nor in practice; 
• With regard to criminal law, the majority of judges and prosecutors assess the balance between the parties as similar both in law and in practice, but fewer than half of lawyers agree with this assessment.

Ability of Citizens to Benefit from the Justice System

• NGO lawyers reported more frequently that the LGBT community and religious minorities are the groups the courts and Prosecutor’s Office do not treat fairly or equally, compared to other social groups. However, the majority of other legal professionals thought all groups were treated mainly or fully fairly/equally;
• Compared to other legal professionals, NGO lawyers less frequently think that representatives of all social groups are treated fairly or equally by the courts and the Prosecutor’s Office;
• Many legal professionals consider the police less effective than other legal institutions. Even some prosecutors, who, overall, reported very positive assessments of justice institutions, called for police reform. 

Quality of Legal Education  

• Prosecutors were, again, the most positive about the quality of legal education in Georgia, with slightly more than half giving a positive assessment. The majority of judges and lawyers did not provide positive evaluations of legal education, either theoretical or practical.

Performance of Justice System Institutions

• The majority of legal professionals considered the performance of most justice system institutions as largely transparent, but lawyers (private, NGO and LAS) assessed the transparency and performance of these institutions harsher than judges and prosecutors; 
• Almost all legal professionals agree that the lack of speedy trials is an impediment to the judicial process that is mainly caused by a shortage of judges and lack of alternative dispute resolution outside of courts;
• The high caseload in the courts was seen as a major issue that has negative effects on the speed, quality and, in the case of the Supreme Court, uniformity of legal decisions. 

The full report of the baseline study is available here. 

USAID Political Party Assessment of Europe and Eurasia

Admittedly we forgot to post this earlier, but we believe it is even more important with the upcoming elections in Georgia.

Democracy International, contracted by USAID, released a report on political party assistance across Europe and Eurasia. In order to carry out fieldwork, they selected four countries (Serbia, Romania, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan). There were a wide number of selection criteria variables, including the fact that both party institutes, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), had to be present in the country. In effect, this created an endogeneity problem in the research design, where countries were studied not because of their inherent differences but because the US government had invested the most resources in them. Of course, one country from each region was also chosen ensuring regional variation but also decreasing variation along other axes.
The report is long and includes an impressive theoretical overview. I will discuss only three subjects, which may be of interest to blog readers and discussed in the research:1) the relationship between political party assistance and development 2) survey work and 3) democratization in Georgia. However, I would encourage anyone interested in how USAID operates in the region to read the report and to also analyze it for the subtexts, since all documents put out by the government (even if it is contracted) will attempt to glaze over (or at least cover up) some things.

1
An important theoretical point was raised in the report: almost no literature exists on causality between political party assistance and development. While many other aspects of democracy have been thoroughly explored, most notably elections, how party assistance shapes democracy is a area ripe for study. I think one of the main reasons this has not been studied is the necessity of long-term on the ground fieldwork to trace out the processes of political party development. Since a comparative basis is needed to do so, the work involved seems particularly overwhelming. This could be an interesting place to create teams of local researchers to work on the ground in a well selected group of countries, to trace these processes over time in a standardized way.


2
The article highlights survey work, which is in one of the areas traditionally covered under party assistance and alludes to the fact that surveying has often been overemphasized and targeted not at domestic constituencies, but at the international and development community. Conversely, the report argues that the nexus between the survey work itself and any public policy outcomes is crucial and should be the focus of any polling efforts. If anything, the report underestimates the lack of sophistication that parties have in interpreting these results and the basic lack of understanding that they have in basic research methods. However, I would argue that the answer is not to give up on this work, but to work much harder on helping local government understand the basis of social research. I also think that does not emphasize enough the role between an active research community and public policy research. While the main goal of public opinion research is to inform politicians, the quality of the research often comes under fire in the region and there is no research community capable of demonstrating the quality of the polling and falsifying claims by polling companies that are unskilled. In order to add this concept to that of major international funders, would involve a much more holistic concept of the notion of development, which is generally missing from the debate. Also missing is any mention of the importance of mixing both quantitative and qualitative methods in polling, since the questions asked on the polls also may need to be better refined that they have been in the past.

3
In the Caucasus, Georgia was chosen for the analysis. Interestingly, the report, while of course lauding the Rose Revolution, notes many of the shortcomings of the the United National Movement (UNM) as a party. It uses the term "bandwagoning" usually used in the field of international relations to explain domestic Georgian politics, in which, according to the report, all of the major forces in the country including the media and civil society elites have become closely affiliated with UNM. According to the report, "these bandwagon effects in societies with weak democratic institutions can produce cycles of political convulsion where an initially liberally-oriented dominant party, facing few challenges from an effective opposition, loses dynamism and popular support,thereby engendering new rounds of political revolution." This statement is worrying for the future of Georgian democracy and may help to put the recent Okruashvili scandal into starker perspective.

Again, the full report can be found here.