'Doing Business in South East Europe 2008 compares business regulations across seven economies (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo*, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia) in four key areas: starting a business, dealing with licenses, registering property, and enforcing contracts. The study provides comparable data for 22 cities that can inspire reforms at the national and local level and add to the reform momentum of the region. The report shows that di more...

'Doing Business (DB), an annual World Bank-IFC publication launched in 2004, is one of the Bank Group's flagship knowledge products. It
measures the burden of selected business regulations in 178 countries and ranks the countries on 10 dimensions. The program's stated objective is to advance the World Bank Group's private sector development agenda in four ways: motivate reforms through country benchmarking; inform the design of reforms; enrich international initiatives on development effectiven more...

'The Criminal Justice Assessment Toolkit is a standardized and cross-referenced set of tools designed to enable United Nations agencies, government officials engaged in criminal justice reform, as well as other organizations and individuals to conduct comprehensive assessments of criminal justice systems; to identify areas of technical assistance; to assist agencies in the design of interventions that integrate United Nations standards and norms on crime prevention and criminal justice; and to a more...

Cyber Forensics is an important part of any criminal investigation involving cyber crimes and contraventions. However, it requires a sound expertise to be practiced. Cyber Forensics in India has started gaining importance out of the necessity to deal with modern cyber crimes. Though India has taken some steps in the direction of enacting ICT related law in the form of Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act, 2000), yet by and large it failed to provide a sound and secure law in this crucial dir more...

An update on United Nations reform and the civil society campaign to reform and strengthen UN gender architecture. By Rochelle Jones.

On February 16 2006, the UN Secretary-General created a new High-level Panel on UN System-wide Coherence in the areas of development, humanitarian assistance and the environment. This panel, consisting of 12 men and 3 women, was tasked with recommending changes to the UN via a “study of the UN’s operational activities [which] assessed how the UN system work more...

The paper argues that adherence to good governance is essential to make strategies for basic service provision and poverty reduction effective and sustainable. It considers nine principles of good governance: (1) inclusiveness and equity, (2) participation, (3) transparency, (4) efficiency, (5) effectiveness, (6) subsidiarity, (7) adherence to the rule of law, (8) accountability and (9) sustainability.
Good governance ensures that the poor and other disadvantaged groups are included in decision more...

An unprecedented and highly sensitive investigative report prepared for Iran's Parliament has detailed instances of corruption throughout the country's judiciary. But in an apparent political tug-of-war between rival Iranian leaders, the nearly 200-page document has been suppressed and never released to the public. VOA has obtained a copy and Payam Yazdian of VOA's Persian News Network reports exclusively on the document's findings.

While women make up half the world's population, they work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10 per cent of the world's income and own less than one per cent of the world's property.

MSI is seeking an experienced Chief of Party for an upcoming USAID Justice Sector Development project in Russia. The CoP position will be located in Russia.
Location: Russia.
Last Date: August 8, 2008.

Prominent experts from 95 nations say their new 'Rule of Law Index' unveiled on July 3, 2008 at the World Justice Forum in Vienna is measuring how a nation's top leaders, officials and judges are behaving— and could help the U.S. and others accused of abuse and compromise in the pursuit of terrorists recommit to basic principles of law and human rights.
Organizers said the Rule of Law Index is still being built, but within three years should offer profiles on 100 nations. The World Justice Pr more...