LATEST ON JUSTIS
JUSTIS is a project designed to provide EU institutions and Member States with new evidence-based indicators for the assessment of public confidence in criminal justice and the fear of crime. The aim of the project is to develop and pilot survey-based indicators of these issues.
JUSTIS project partners, External Expert Group Members and other experts on confidence and fear of crime gathered in Sofia, Bulgaria for a two-day conference on 24–25 March 2009. The JUSTIS research team also had a project meeting before the conference.
Work package 2, which looks into current indicators on public confidence and fear of crime in all participating member states, and assesses the need for confidence indicators according to scientists, criminal justice managers and government officials, has been completed. The deliverables and reports of WP2 can be read here.
Work package 3 is currently underway. The aim of this work package is to provide theoretical foundations – the “roadmap” – to guide the development of new and improved social indicators of public confidence that allow for the understanding of national peculiarities and for productive comparisons across the EU.
Work packages 4 and 5 have also been started in April 2009. The aim of work package 4 is to develop scientific indicators of public confidence in justice. Work package 5 looks into country-based contextual data which is relevant to public confidence in justice.
We have also received good news: four JUSTIS partners (London School of Economics, King’s College London, University of Sheffield and HEUNI) together with the Dutch research institute NSCR, have submitted a successful proposal to the European Social Survey for space in its fifth sweep. We envisage that this work will proceed tightly in parallel with JUSTIS, and that the questions on trust in justice developed by the JUSTIS project will be included in the ESS. The contextual variables on member states’ justice systems, collected in the course of work package 5, will also be used for multi-level modelling in the ESS. The ESS questions will be developed over the coming months, with piloting and fieldwork in 2010. Data will be available in 2011.
WP2 COMPLETED
The first substantive Work package of the JUSTIS project, Work package 2 ‘Review of need: State-of-the-art indicators of public confidence in justice for policy assessment’ has been completed. The aim of the work package was to chart the state of academic understanding about public trust in justice and public feelings of insecurity in different European countries, and to assess the state of the art in using survey-based measures of trust and insecurity as tools of governance.
The picture to emerge from work package 2 is predictably mixed. Some countries have invested more academic and research effort than others in this field. Some have already developed survey indicators, for example the UK. Others see limited value in them, preferring to focus on improvements to the operation of the justice process itself, rather than on public perceptions of the process. Most occupy the middle ground, seeing the potential of indicators, but with little direct experience of them.
The main conclusion that we draw from the results of this work package is that the overall direction of the project is justified. There is a general recognition of the importance of building or consolidating public commitment to the rule of law, and a sense that EU Member States need reliable evidence on levels and trends in public trust in justice. However, the risk that the strategy to build trust and confidence in justice could degrade into populist strategies must be taken into consideration.
SOFIA CONFERENCE
JUSTIS project partners, members of the External Expert Group and distinguished guests assembled for the first international JUSTIS conference in Sofia, Bulgaria on 24–25 March 2009 to discuss the results of work package 2 and the progress of the project. The conference was generously hosted by the Bulgarian project partner, the Center for the Study of Democracy. The JUSTIS group had an internal meeting on 23 March dedicated to practical matters. The conference programme included presentations on public confidence in the criminal justice system and the police in Belgium, the UK and the Czech Republic and on the drivers of police legitimacy in the context of the UK. We also had a presentation on people’s punitiveness in the Netherlands, and colleagues from Germany and Sweden reported on experience in their countries related to trust in the police and victimisation surveys. The speakers included Prof. Mike Hough from King’s College, London, Maria Yordanova and her colleagues Miriana Ilcheva and Dimitar Markov from CSD, Prof. Stephan Parmentier from the University of Leuven, Dr. Jan de Keijser from the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Prof. Helmut Kury from the University of Freiburg, Prof. Jiri Burianek from the Charles University in Prague, Jim Parson from the VERA insitutute and Kjell Elefalk from the Swedish police.
Click here for more information and pictures from the conference. The conference programme and presentations are available here.
The Center for the Study of Democracy also organised a public discussion on indicators of public confidence in justice as tools for policy assessment at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) on 24 March 2009. The Minister of Justice of the Republic of Bulgaria, Ms. Miglena Tacheva, was present at the event and addressed the participants by declaring independence as a basic principle in the work of the judiciary and stressing on the need of public debate on the efficiency of justice.
Click here for more information and pictures from the public discussion event.
CURRENT AND FUTURE ACTIVITIES
Work package 3 started towards the end of 2008. The aim of this work package is to provide theoretical foundations – the “conceptual roadmap” – to guide the development of new and improved social indicators of public confidence. Project partners from the UK and France have drafted a paper that covers all main concepts of JUSTIS project, such as confidence, trust, legitimacy and fear of crime. Another task which is currently underway is the completion of a series of focus group interviews with lay people to test their understanding of these concepts. The interviews will be carried out in all participating countries. The idea is to see what kinds of meanings and definitions ordinary people give to concepts like trust and confidence, and then to think how these findings could be used when designing the survey questions.
Overall, the aim of work package 3 is to clarify and define the concepts that drive the indicators which will be developed in work packages 4 and 5. These work packages started in April 2009. In WP4, attitudinal survey-based indicators of public confidence in criminal justice will be developed. This work package is led by University of Sheffield. Work package 5 looks into country-based contextual data to highlight local specificities and assist the consortium in interpreting survey-based attitudinal indicators. This work package is led by the University of Parma.
JUSTIS partners from London School of Economics, King’s College London and University of Sheffield are organising a panel on JUSTIS called Social Indicators of Trust in Criminal Justice and Insecurities about Crime at the European Survey Research Association conference in Warsaw on 29 June to 3 July 2009.
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