As last year, the 2024 RLI has been calculated for 142 jurisdictions. The detailed description of the method for calculating the RLI is available here.

The leaders of the ranking (where 1 point is the highest level of compliance with the principle of the rule of law, and 0 is the lowest one) are, as per regular practice, Denmark (score of 0.9), Norway (0.89), Finland (0.87), Sweden (0.86) and Germany (0.83). The bottom of the ranking is occupied by Venezuela (0.26), Cambodia (0.31), Afghanistan (0.32), Haiti (0.33) and Myanmar (0.34).

The most significant decrease in the level of compliance with the principle of the rule of law over the year has been registered in El Salvador that has fallen from the 108th to 111th place in the ranking and Myanmar (from 135th to 138th). Conversely, Vietnam that has risen from the 87th to the 81st place, Thailand – from the 82nd to the 78th, Poland – from the 36th to the 33rd, Brazil – from the 83rd to the 80th and Sri Lanka – from the 77th to the 75th, improving their performance if compared to 2023; at the same time, the level of compliance with the principle of the rule of law of these jurisdictions is still poorer than their performance in 2016 (for Sri Lanka in 2017), when they got the highest score.

The total score of the Russian Federation has decreased by 0.01. Russia is ranked the 113th, as last year. Under the “absence of corruption” indicator the country has risen by four positions and occupied the 88th place.

In general, the WJP experts highlight that the level of compliance with the principle of the rule of law has been decreasing globally for seven years in a row. In 2024, the regress has been registered in 57% of reviewed jurisdictions with the overall performance decreasing by 0.2% on average. The researchers believe that one of the main reasons thereof consists in active expansion of authoritarianism that results in the decrease of indicators in such areas as constraints on government powers (the fall of the index has been registered in 59% of countries in 2024) and respect for fundamental rights (in 63% of countries).

However, the authors of the ranking point out that the negative trends have slightly slowed down over the past years. For instance, the proportion of countries whose performance has constantly deteriorated has been reducing for several consecutive years: in 2021, there were 71% of such countries, in 2022 – 61%, in 2023 – 59%, and in 2024 – 57%. Potential reasons justifying this trend include (1) improvement of domestic justice systems: in 2024 in particular, performance under the criminal justice indicator has improved in 54% of reviewed countries, and under civil justice has decreased only in 56% of countries (compared to 66% last year), and (2) increased quality of the fight against corruption: this year, it is for the first time in five years that over a half of countries (59%) have improved their performance under the absence of corruption indicator.