Experts, analysts or freedom fighters?
5 October 2017. “How Legal Think Tanks provide, or fail to provide, knowledge to governments in Central and Eastern Europe” - is the new policy paper by INPRIS.
Good governance requires evidence based, thought-out decision making. Legal Think Tanks (LTTs) can play an important role in the area of law, policy, and public debate. Reports from six CEE countries prove that despite local differences, there are similar challenges pertaining to interactions between think tanks and governments. The Paper presents common conclusions offered by the legal think tanks, their best practices and recommendations. These recommendations have to be applied with consideration to the context which can vary to a large extent in particular countries (e.g. in “illiberal democracies” governments tend to systematically ignore/attack liberal think tanks).
One of the dilemmas that legal think tanks face nowadays in CEE:
Expert v. Freedom Fighter
It is one thing for a legal think tank to research the optimal number of assistants per one judge, and it is quite another thing to discuss the government’s proposal to fire overnight all the Supreme Court Justices. Both problems require competent, objective analysis. The latter issue is so important, and the solution is so controversial, that the staff of the think tank feels the professional and moral duty to go further than research – experts become “freedom fighters”.
More in the Policy Paper. You are welcome to comment at inpris [at] inpris.pl or social media. The paper is available in 7 languages:
The Policy Paper was developed within the project “Legal Think Tanks and Government – Capacity Building”, supported by the International Visegrad Fund.
Our project Partners:
League of Human Rights (Czechia),
Eötvös Károly Public Policy Institute (Hungary),
Legal Resources Centre (Moldova),
VIA IURIS (Slovakia),
Centre for Policy and Legal Reform (Ukraine).