Brussels, 09/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - For the third year in a row, the European Commission released a 'Justice Scoreboard' on Monday 9 March, giving an overview of the legal systems of the member states and their capacity to boost the growth and competitiveness of the EU.
In this exercise (which comes as part of the 'European Semester'), which was presented by the Czech Commissioner Vera Jourova, the Commission looked at three major criteria: the quality, efficiency and perceived independence of the systems, although the aim was not to define the “best possible system”, as the Commissioner stressed, as each national tradition must be taken into account. It is, however, possible to create a justice environment which is both conducive to businesses and the confidence of the citizens, the Commission states. But for this 2015 version of the scoreboard, it once again had to work with missing figures, for instance as regards the efficiency of the justice system. No figures were available from Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, the United Kingdom or the Netherlands.
Even so, the Commission has been able to draw a number of conclusions. “Improvement in the efficiency of justice systems in member states can be observed”, it states. Efforts to make better use of information and communication technology to the benefit of the justice systems have also continued. In most of the member states, more than 20% of judges have participated in continuous training on EU law or on the law of other member states, the Commission adds, stating that this figure “considerably exceeds the 5% annual target of legal practitioners who need to be trained in order to reach, by 2020, the objective of 50%”. Most member states also offer the general public online access, free of charge, to verdicts in civil and commercial matters. The scoreboard also looks at equality and the representation of women, noting that “the higher the court, the lower the share of female judges”. Even if the share of female professional judges for both first and second instance shows a positive trend, “for the Supreme Courts most member states still have some way to go to reach the gender balance of 40-60%”, Vera Jourova said.
Behind these general conclusions, there are some considerable disparities between the member states. As regards the length of time taken for proceedings and the settlement of commercial and civil cases at first instance, Luxembourg comes top of the table and has reduced these times over three years, the situation has grown worse in Italy, Malta and Cyprus. On the perception of the independence of the judiciary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Spain come bottom, with perceptions (based on data supplied by the World Economic Forum) of 2.3 for Slovakia and Bulgaria over the period 2013-2014, compared to 6.5 Finland, top of the table ahead of Denmark and Ireland. Spain dropped to 3.2 for 2013-14 from 3.7 for the period 2012-13 and 4 in 2010-12, according to these figures. Hungary, which frequently comes under fire, came 16th out of 28 for the perception of independence, having made progress over three years. However, the country continues to occupy last place for the representation of women in the Supreme Courts. (Solenn Paulic)