Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania rank at the bottom of EU countries in terms of their nation’s adherence to the rule of law from the perspective of how ordinary people experience it. Five EU countries ‒ Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden ‒ rank among the top 10 best performers in the Rule of Law Index, launched on 5 March 2014 by the World Justice Project (WJP) and audited by the JRC.

The index ranks Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Venezuela as the least adherent to the rule of law. Trends to watch: while the level of adherence to the rule of law remained relatively stable throughout the EU, Spain saw the largest individual decline. Peoples’ perception of corruption in the legislature appears to be growing in several EU countries.

The report is addressed to policy-makers, businesses, NGOs and other interested parties as a tool to assess a nation’s respect for the rule of law, to identify its strengths and weaknesses compared to other countries and to monitor changes over time. It does not aim at pointing fingers, but it incites Governments to reflection.

The 2014 release of the Rule of Law Index builds on 47 sub-factors and almost 500 survey questions gathered from over 100,000 citizens and local legal experts to offer a comprehensive look at the performance of 99 countries by looking at the levels of limited government powers, absence of corruption, open government, fundamental rights, order and security, regulatory enforcement, civil justice, criminal justice and informal justice. The report also includes for the first time an analysis of changes over time.

The scores in the report are based on a methodology whose statistical reliability was audited by the JRC's Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC). JRC researchers also provided with confidence intervals of the country ranks and acted as academic advisers to the report. The WJP Rule of Law Index was assessed along two main avenues: the statistical coherence of the structure and the impact of key modeling choices on the index scores and ranks. The JRC analysis suggested that the structure of the WJP Rule of Law Index 2014 is statistically sound in terms of coherence and balance.

A key component of the Rule of Law Index, namely “Civil justice is free of improper government influence” (sub-factor 7.4) has fed into the 2014 EU Justice Scoreboard, released by the European Commission on Monday 17th March 2014. This component measures whether the civil justice system is independent from political influence and whether the government unduly affects the outcome of cases.