The rule of law in the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. slid back after last year’s improvement, according to the 2023 report of international nonprofit World Justice Project (WJP).
The Philippines now ranks 100th out of 142 countries with a rule of law score of 0.46, according to the Rule of Law Index report published on Wednesday. The index score ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 being the highest and having the strongest adherence to the rule of law.
This was lower than last year’s score of 0.47, when the country ranked 97th out of 140. In East Asia and the Pacific, the Philippines placed 13th out of 15 countries, just behind China and above Myanmar and Cambodia. The country’s score is also below the region’s average score of 0.59.
The WJP Rule of Law Index is drawn from a “rigorous methodology” involving at least 3,400 experts and surveys among at least 149,000 households in 142 countries, covering at least 95 percent of the global population.
Improvements, setbacks
The score given to one country is an average of eight factors, ranging from zero to one.
The country’s current scores in four out of eight factors decreased from last year: constraints on government powers (0.47, down from 0.48 in 2022), absence of corruption (0.43, down from 0.44), open government (0.47, down from 0.50), regulatory enforcement (0.48, down from 0.47) and criminal justice (0.31, down from 0.32).
Meanwhile, its scores for fundamental rights (0.40) and civil justice (0.45) remain unchanged.
The Philippines scored the highest in order and security, gaining a score of 0.67 out of 1—a slight increase from 0.66 in 2022.
“What we’ve seen in the Philippines, when there’s a change in the government, there are improvements in the first year such as constraints of government powers and fundamental rights, but the years that follow there are sometimes just setbacks,” WJP chief research officer Alejandro Ponce said.
“This does not necessarily imply that countries return to a positive trajectory and continue [on] that trajectory. Building institutions when they are not strong takes time,” he explained.
Trajectories
When the WPJ report was first published in 2015, the Philippines had an overall score of 0.53, ranking 51st out of 102 countries.
In 2016, it dropped to 70th place out of 113 countries with a score of 0.51, coinciding with the start of bloody war on drugs waged by the previous administration of President Rodrigo Duterte.
As the index expanded to include more states, the country’s ranking started to fall even as its score hovered between 0.46 and 0.47.
It placed 88th in the 2017-2018 report, 89th in 2019, 91st in 2020 and 102nd in 2021.
According to the WJP report, the rule of law once again eroded in most other countries—with 82 countries posting index declines, while only 58 had improved scores.
“More than 6 billion people live in a country where the rule of law weakened between 2022 and 2023,” the report noted.
The top-ranked country in the 2023 WJP Rule of Law Index is Denmark with a score of 0.90 out of 1, followed by fellow European nations Norway (0.89), Finland (0.87), Sweden (0.85) and Germany (0.83).
The bottom-ranked countries are Venezuela (0.26), Cambodia (0.31), Afghanistan (0.32), Haiti (0.34) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (0.34).