The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor was an independent international commission, hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and established in 2005 as the “first global initiative to focus on the link between exclusion, poverty, and the law.” Drawing on three years of research and consultations, the Commission proposed strategies for creating inclusive development initiatives that would empower those living in poverty through increased protections and rights.
The Commission's final 2008 report, Making the Law Work for Everyone, argued that as many as 4 billion people worldwide are “robbed of the chance to better their lives and climb out of poverty, because they are excluded from the rule of law”. In response, the report proposed four “pillars” for legal empowerment of the poor, which, the Commission argued, would enable those living in poverty to become partners in, rather than passive recipients of, development programs. These four pillars are: access to justice and the rule of law, property rights, labor rights, and business rights.
Upon concluding its work and producing its final report, the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor ceased to exist. The Commission’s findings gave rise to a number of initiatives, including UNDP’s Initiative on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (created in 2008), the Justice for the Poor program at the World Bank (started in 2009), work on Legal Empowerment as part of the Justice Initiative of the Open Society Foundations and more recently the creation of the Global Legal Empowerment Network (2012) and the Legal Empowerment Fund (2020).
A high-level event held in 2018 at the start of the 73rd United Nations General Assembly, marked the tenth anniversary of Making the Law Work for Everyone. It lauded the Commission's work as a foundation for the then newly formed Task Force on Justice, created to develop an agenda to realize 'access to justice for all' by 2030, as defined in Sustainable Development Goal 16.
History of Legal Empowerment of the Poor
The concept of Legal Empowerment, and the work of the Commission, was grounded in the ideas of Hernando de Soto and his book The Mystery of Capital. The central idea is that the way that the law and the justice sector operates in a society is critical to economic growth, yet often overlooked by economists. In the words of the Commission: "the legal underpinnings of entrepreneurship, employment and market interaction are often taken for granted by traditional approaches to development and standard economic theory." Unequal access to justice systems, other forms of dispute resolution, and public services, translates to unequal access to economic prosperity and therefor multiplies inequality.
Development scholars such as Dan Banik argued that “the relationship between law and development in the international development discourse was traditionally very narrowly focused on law, lawyers and state institutions.” The result, more often than not, was a “top-down” approach to development, in which aid initiatives often overlooked or excluded the voices of the very people they intended to help. Legal empowerment of the poor, by contrast, sought to bring excluded voices into the development discussion, while at the same time working to expand protections afforded to those living in poverty. Stephen Golub, one of the scholars in the field, argued that legal empowerment “puts community-driven and rights-based development into effect by offering concrete mechanisms, involving but not limited to legal services, that alleviate poverty, advance the rights of the disadvantaged, and make the rule of law more of a reality for them”.
Drawing upon these principles and bolstered by the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, the mission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor emerged as an effort to connect work on access to justice, the rule of law and human rights on the one hand, to efforts to reduce poverty and promote economic growth on the other hand.
Founding of the Commission
The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, co-chaired by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Hernando de Soto, Peruvian economist and founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), was launched in 2005 by a group of developing and industrialized countries including Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Guatemala, Iceland, India, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Tanzania and the United Kingdom, and completed its work in 2008.