For this year’s UN Day on the Eradication of Poverty, HiiL’s Dr. Martin Gramatikov discusses why poverty and justice are inseparable: without accessible, people-centred justice, escaping the poverty trap becomes nearly impossible.
Koynare is a small town, almost a village, in northwestern Bulgaria. It lies in the country’s most economically disadvantaged region, which is also among the poorest in the EU. Public services are not very reliable there. For instance, garden waste is not collected by the municipal trucks. This opens a tiny space for people with horse-drawn wagons who, for a modest fee, collect the trash and take it to the dump. My wife is from Koynare and we spend quite a lot of time there. For our trash, I usually call a neighbour, Ivo (not his real name), who belongs to the Roma minority. He lives in severe economic hardship and, despite being in his 40s, cannot read or write. Ivo also does not recognise numbers. I suspect he suffers from some form of dyscalculia, though he has never been diagnosed. When I pay him, he carefully spreads the banknotes on the ground, examining their colour and size to estimate their value. This is how he judges whether he’s being paid fairly.
Ivo struggles to provide for his family. He used to illegally gather and sell firewood, which brought a bit more money to his stressed household. Last year, he was caught by forest rangers with a small wagonload of about two cubic metres of wood. His wagon was confiscated, and he was warned that next time they would take his horse as well. When I asked if he thought this was fair, or whether he planned to appeal, he just shrugged. “What can I do?” he said. Lawyers, courts, and laws are worlds away from his everyday reality. Yet I believe he might have a legitimate case: his load was not timber but shrubs, which are not illegal to cut. Meanwhile, large-scale loggers—the so-called timber mafia—allegedly destroy forests at an incomparably larger scale and face little consequence.
People living in poverty like Ivo need protection, justice and fairness, but the opaque, expensive and inaccessible justice system is far from their lives. Low-income individuals are overrepresented among those who need justice, but underrepresented among those who use it. When a legal problem arises, a person like Ivo is far more likely to do nothing, and less likely to achieve a fair resolution.. People facing economic hardship do not need abstract justice systems. They need well-designed justice pathways, which work for them and solve their problems. In an ideal world, the illiterate Ivo should be assisted towards a meaningful livelihood. A justice process should recognise his limitations and vulnerabilities and create opportunities rather than impose punishments.
Justice systems must understand much better the different types of poverty and the specific needs, capabilities and expectations of different people. There are many different types of poverty, each with its own root causes and consequences. An IDP in Burkina Faso has very different needs from a homeless person in Washington, DC, from a street vendor in Nairobi or from a community in Nepal which lost everything due to floods. The justice system should “see” and understand these differences. Most of all, justice should care about people. Unfortunately, most justice systems still respond with predictable measures: waiving court fees, appointing public defenders, or relying on pro bono lawyers and university legal clinics. These efforts help, but they cannot scale to meet the vast unmet demand for justice among hundreds of millions of poor people.
There is no silver bullet. But making justice people-centred and user-focused is the way forward. Justice services should recognise the lived realities of users, their needs, capabilities, and experiences, and put them at the centre of design and delivery. For individuals and communities experiencing poverty, justice is not an isolated issue. It is intertwined with access to food, health care, education, and housing. Justice forms part of the essential guardrails of human development, alongside literacy, employable skills, job stability, access to finance, and health services. Without accessible, efficient, and fair justice, escaping the poverty trap becomes almost impossible. Lastly, escaping poverty does not mean that the issue of justice has been solved. On the contrary, HiiL research demonstrates that escaping poverty brings new challenges to access to justice. The middle class has more disposable income, more assets and enters into more relationships. A truly people-centred justice system must evolve with them, continuously adapting to meet users’ changing needs.
