Assessment of access to justice in the civil justice system of Iran

Access to justice should be outlined one of the fundamental principles in the Civil Procedure. It is an indicator of efficient judiciary and a measure of social justice Access to justice can be analyzed in terms of physical access and qualitative access. The purpose of physical access, the proper allocation of facilities and resources through the system of distribution of qualifications, the systematic development of physical spaces, and so on, in order to make the judicial system more efficient. Qualitative access is a fair trial within a reasonable time, without undue delay, with standard costs, and ultimately achieving the appropriate compensation and enforceability of the result. In the other words, if access to justice is inexpensive and quality of procedure and outcome is at a high level, it can be said that the justice is more readily accessible. But how can diagnose accessible justice from inaccessible, is questioning from real users to be examined their experiences of costs and quality. The measurement is done by examining three features of dispute settlement: costs, quality of procedure and quality of outcome. Therefore, research emphasis is on user-centric approach and the findings are presented based on interviews with actual judicial users. The research method is descriptive-analytical and methodology in addition to a library and documents search, referred to the survey population through questionnaires. The results of the data collection showed that quality of procedure and quality of outcome is desirable from perspective of users but costs (such as financial costs, opportunity costs and intangible costs) are undesirable. Effective and efficient services require investment in time and quality; reducing the length of the proceedings and providing high quality sentences and the usual cost to people is guaranteed the access to justice in Iran's civil justice system.