During the course of their lives, people often need access to justice. When following “paths to justice”, people will spend money, time and efforts in order to sort out their problems. Examples of paths to justice are: obtaining a birth registration, getting police protection, negotiations regarding compensation for a victim, settling a property claim, solving a labor dispute through mediation, coping with family conflicts, arbitration to solve international business disputes. Both users and suppliers of paths to justice, however, generally lack information about the price of interventions and the procedural and outcome quality they can expect.

Measuring the Cost and Quality of Access to Justice is a research and development project with a primary goal to develop a standard methodology for measuring the costs and quality that users of justice may expect on the most common paths to justice. Access to justice is measured through three indicators – costs, quality of the procedure and quality of the outcome. These indicators are measured from the perspective of the users of justice.

The overarching goal of the project is to develop and validate a methodology for measuring the costs, quality of the procedure and quality of outcome of paths to justice.