What we do

Since its inception in 1991, the EBRD has supported the improvement of legal systems in the economies where it invests. For an economy to have a safe investment climate, it must have a fair and reliable legal system.

The EBRD's Legal Transition Programme (LTP) assists in improving every partner country's legislation, judicial institutions and organisational culture to cultivate an investor-friendly, transparent and predictable legal environment.

In particular, we do this through:

Standard-setting. The Bank participates in and contributes to international standard-setting initiatives.

Assessments of laws and practices. We monitor and analyse the status of legal transition in the economies where we invest and develop measurement tools to assess the legal risk for the Bank's investments. Specific sector assessments benchmark the development of key legal sectors in each economy against international or harmonised standards. Law assessments, meanwhile, provide a means of judging the progress made by a single jurisdiction in making its commercial laws internationally acceptable.

Assisting governments. The Bank develops and implements technical cooperation projects in the economies where we invest. These are designed to support local authorities in establishing investor-friendly legal systems.

Outreach. The EBRD collaborates widely in order to advance commercial law reform and promote best practice. The Bank coordinates closely with other international financial institutions, international organisations and bilateral assistance providers as well as a number of academic institutions in order to facilitate discussion and further publicise best practice. In addition, the LTP aims to build a body of knowledge of existing legal frameworks so as to make potential projects with governments more efficient as well as more relevant for the region itself.

The LTP focuses on the topics which are most relevant to the EBRD's investment activities and in relation to which the Bank has accumulated the most experience. These  are:

• Corporate Governance;
• Dispute resolution (which includes courts digital transformation and judicial capacity building, alternative dispute resolution, commercial mediation, enforcement regimes and enforcement officers and bailiffs, and capacity building);
• Energy and Climate Change (which includes energy regulation, sustainability and energy efficiency);
• Financial law (which includes access to finance, financial technology [fintech], and insolvency and debt restructuring);
• Infrastructure and Natural Resources (which includes information and communications technology [ICT] and public-private partnerships [PPPs]);
• Public procurement. 

The Legal Transition Programme is a group of lawyers, each with a specific area of legal expertise. They lead the EBRD's efforts in legal reform in their specialist areas and the related legal technical assistance projects. These lawyers work closely with the Bank's project-focused lawyers to identify and overcome legal impediments to investments. 

In 2010 a Financial Law Unit was created within the Legal Transition Programme to address, on a systematic basis, the challenges faced by investors engaged in financial transactions in the transition region. The Unit specialises in questions relating to capital markets, corporate governance, insolvency and access to finance.

The Legal Transition Programme's specific objectives are periodically re-evaluated and detailed in multiyear Action Plans. These allow objectives to be adjusted to take into account of the current legal, political and economic environment in the EBRD region, as well as the Bank's investment strategy.

The overarching goal of the current strategy is for the EBRD to preserve and accelerate transition in the economies we invest in through the crisis and recovery phases in response to recent economic hardships. Through its strategy, the EBRD is also fully committed to continue tackling deep-rooted broader challenges - and leveraging new opportunities - including environmental, demographics and technological transformation to build a more resilient and sustainable future. Agility and flexibility are hallmarks of the EBRD's implemenation of the strategy. The Bank is responsive to market and reform conditions, and innovative in helping counties transition to a sustainable market economy through the pursuit of six transition qualities: competitive, well-governed, green, inclusive, resilient and integrated.

The Legal Transition Programme is funded both from the Bank's budget and through donor grants provided by the EBRD's shareholders and other official sources. The programme accepts practical support such as fellowship funding, training facilities and event publicity.