GNH and the dilemmas of justice in Bhutan

Superficially, GNH and justice seem well aligned. Their supposedly natural congruence is given in the title of the 2015 GNH Survey report, A Compass Towards a Just and Harmonious Society. Yet remarkably, the word ‘justice’ does not appear once in the GNH Survey report’s 330 pages. While ‘the just society’ might be held out as a goal, its force in Bhutan is largely rhetorical. As one very seasoned legal practitioner recently remarked, “Bhutan has a criminal legal system, but it doesn’t have a criminal justice system”. Other papers at this conference will consider questions of encouraging more justice within the so-called criminal justice system. This paper is concerned with wider conceptions of justice and how the holistic vision of GNH might support a more just society characterised by forms of people-centred justice.