Evaluation of European Judicial Systems

In order forr the report on European Judicial Systems 2002 to become a proper tool to improve public policies of justice and European citizens, the CEPEJ has decided to renew the exercise of evaluation for 2004 data. It started its work in February 2005 by revising the evaluation scheme in the light of encountered difficulties during the first exercise.

The CEPEJ set up the Working Group on the evaluation of judicial systems (CEPEJ-GT-EVAL) to carry out this task.

The evaluation Report: «European judicial systems - facts and figures»adopted by the CEPEJ in December 2004 has been well received by the European legal community and by the relevant authorities in the member States.

The impact assessment has shown that the Report has been i) widely disseminated among the relevant national institutions, ii) studied by policy makers and judicial authorities in many member States and iii) already used as a basis for reforms in several member States.

The exercise was being repeated on the basis of a revised Scheme, approved by the Committee of Ministers on 7 September 2005. The revised Scheme had been drawn up in the light of the lessons learnt from the experimental exercise and drawing on the network of national correspondents set up to collect the data.

To highlight some of the improvements: the Scheme contains a number of new questions regarding the users of justice and the rights of victims; intends to clarify concepts such as the definition of courts or the various types of judges; insists on the issue of fair trail according to Article 6 of the ECHR and addresses issues such as the evaluation of court performance and the development of alternative dispute resolutions.

The main purpose of revising the Scheme was to come up with a questionnaire that could be systematically used in future evaluation exercises.

On 5 October 2006, the CEPEJ published its report on the 2006 European judicial systems and decided to pursue the analysis of the facts and figures thus presented, to understand the functioning of justice systems, define common indicators to evaluate the functioning of justice systems, identify main trends and difficulties and orient the public policies of justice towards more quality and efficiency. In making its unique database available for use to researchers wishing to benefit from its official scientific support, the CEPEJ invites the European scientific community to work on 6 specific studies. The CEPEJ will also study other proposals of projects aiming at analysing the results presented in its report. The studies retained by the CEPEJ will be published within the framework of the series «the Studies of the CEPEJ».

Protocol for the exploitation of the report

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Evaluation of European Judicial Systems