United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) tasked MEASURE-BiH with conducting a brief assessment of the BiH justice sector and with identifying which current issues and needs of the BiH justice sector could be met most effectively by USAID assistance.

The brief assessment of the BiH justice sector, through four assessment questions with seven subquestions, addressed the current context under which the justice sector operates, the most pressing issues in the justice sector, ongoing or planned interventions of other stakeholders, current gaps and needs for further technical assistance, and recommendations to the USAID Mission in terms of further programming in the justice sector. The assessment also estimated the need for or potential benefit of continuing direct assistance to the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council of BiH (HJPC) in some of the significant areas of HJPC’s mandate.

The Assessment team used a mixed-method approach based on an extensive desk review of implementation documents, relevant reports from international organizations and local government documentation, analysis of available administrative data on processing corruption and economic crime cases from 2014 to 2017, as well as administrative data on processing all cases tracked by the Judicial Effectiveness Index of Bosnia and Herzegovina (JEI-BiH) from 2012 to 2017, analysis of available JEI-BiH survey data on public perceptions from 2015 to 2017, analysis of available JEI-BiH survey data on perceptions of judges and prosecutors from 2015 to 2017, and semi-structured interviews with 56 key informants (KIs). The main limitations of this Assessment relate to possible response bias from respondents.