An Access to Justice Assessment is a tool that can assist courts in planning their work, allocating resources and responding to community concerns. It can assist the court to improve service delivery by identifying justice needs within a particular country. Access to Justice Assessments provides people with an opportunity to give feedback on their justice needs and how justice sector agencies are addressing those needs. They also provide courts, including island courts, and other justice sector agencies with an opportunity to collect this feedback and plan taking the views of users and potential users into consideration.

This toolkit recommends:

• as a pilot, courts that use the toolkit should pro-actively seek to address at least 2-3 concrete needs identified through Access to Justice Assessments;

• Courts undertake some form of assessment on a routine basis to measure performance in addition to identifying emerging needs; and

• Courts provide information publicly on steps the courts will take to address identified need. This process is important in building confidence in the judicial system.