The International Framework for Court Excellence is a quality management system designed to help courts to improve their performance. It includes universal core values, seven areas of court excellence aligned with those values, as well as concepts, case studies, and tools by which courts worldwide can voluntarily assess and improve the quality of justice and court administration.

The Framework is the product of an international attempt to identify a process for achieving court excellence regardless of the location or size of a court or the resources or technology available to it. It uses the term “court” to refer broadly to any organization that is part of a country’s judicial system, including courts and tribunals of general, limited and special jurisdiction.

The main enhancements to the new edition are the inclusion of assessment statements relating to ethics, conduct, technology, risk management, security, data integrity, ADR and problem solving approaches. The self-assessment process and the scoring methodology have been simplified. We would like to thank the Abu Dhabi Judicial Department, the Indonesia Judiciary, and the UNDP for providing translations for the latest edition of the framework, which can be downloaded below.

The Third Edition of the International Framework for Court Excellence (May 2020) is now available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Laotian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.