Everyone might be familiar with the term “good governance” which in a nutshell refers to the principle of equitable, transparent, accountable, and participatory public administration for inclusive political, social and economic development.
The criminal justice system, when effectively functioning, is regarded as a key element in building a good governance society because it helps build a peaceful and secure society by countering all types of serious crime, including corruption. But what if the criminal justice administration itself lacks good governance and law enforcement or judicial powers are used not so transparently?
Drug suspects are handcuffed during a raid in a Bangkok slum. The justice system needs a develop performance indicators to ensure its efficiency and integrity to boost public confidence that all are considered equal under the law. Chanat Katanyu
A strong and effective criminal justice system is one very essential component for a fair and peaceful society. The criminal justice system is established and operated according to the rule of law and with due process to counter criminal activities. Nonetheless, it is never an easy task to ensure that the criminal justice system itself is free from abuse of power.
Having well-written legislation solely is not enough. Probably what matters the most is how our criminal justice authorities use their legal powers.
In order for us to know if our criminal justice system functions effectively, we need to find a practical way to measure (or at least reflect) the level of integrity, transparency, accountability and capacity of each criminal justice agency at the output level and of the whole system at the outcome level.
In Thailand, there has never been any reliable tool to concretely measure the performance of our justice system.
So far we have mainly catered to perception. For decades, Thailand has been facing justice-related challenges affecting the public trust in justice, and there have been many calls for judicial reform. Yet, we Thais have never been confident if any acclaimed reform is truly a reform unless there is a means to measure progress toward the anticipated changes.
While public and expert perceptions are useful indicators of justice performance, what we should rely on as well is a set of administrative data, statistic, and information that could be aggregated, digested and analysed to indicate up and down of each key justice value over time.
Developing and making good use of justice performance indicators will in turn improve the way we collect, digest, analyse and make use of our crime and criminal justice statistic and data.
At a seminar recently organised by the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ), a prominent international expert on criminal justice, Professor Yvon Dandurand accurately emphasised that: “If we don’t find ways to measure what we value, we may well end up valuing only what we can measure.”
In 2011, the United Nations published the first edition of the Implementation Guide on the Rule of Law Indicators as a tool for technical assistance activities for building and strengthening the “rule of law” in developing nations, particularly countries in transition or those emerging from armed conflict. This implementation guide offered quite an extensive list of criminal justice indicators to diagnose the “health” of criminal justice as the key component of the rule of law.
Although it is a guideline for UN officials and designed initially to be used in post-conflict countries, the four key groups of indicators which are (1) performance, (2) integrity, transparency and accountability, (3) treatment of vulnerable groups, and (4) capacity, are crucially relevant and should be applicable to most jurisdictions.
In addition, the TIJ and the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy (ICCLR) based in Canada have jointly published the Reference Tool on Justice Indicators and Criminal Justice Reform. Such indicators are needed to answer the question of whether the reform process was a success or failure. In addition, easily comprehensible indicators would enhance the quality of public dialogue and participation related to criminal justice reform.
Last month, the TIJ and ICCLR also co-organised an ancillary meeting in Doha, Qatar, to discuss how performance indicators could help make criminal justice reform truly meaningful to the public at large.
A key message from ICCLR was: “Justice indicators are useful tools to evaluate performance, draw attention to issues, establish benchmarks, monitor progress, and evaluate the impact of interventions or reform initiatives”.
For the TIJ, our key point was that having a set of practical justice indicators would significantly help Thai lay-people to really see what is and will be happening within our criminal justice system and the related reform process.
With criminal justice performance being measured over years, policy-makers and practitioners could assess the overall performance and diagnose causes of deficiencies more systematically. This will eventually gear our national policy decisions related to criminal justice toward a more evidence-based approach.
We are of the view that a practical set of justice performance indicators can substantially help identify deficiencies and their causes, so that remedial strategies and resources can be designed and directed accordingly. Most importantly, with the justice performance indicators, the Thai people would be able to understand "who" the acclaimed decades-long justice reform is for and whether it is truly a reform they have been anticipated.
Kittipong Kittayarak is Executive Director of the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ). He is formerly Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice.
