The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) published its annual report on 6 October, examining information collated in 2014 from 45 Council of Europe (CoE) member countries, along with an observer country, Israel.
The report shows a general rise in budgets for judicial systems but says that countries hard hit by the economic crisis (such as Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal) are still implementing regular budget cuts.
Other countries (such as Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovenia) have started catching up or are continuing to catch up. For example, the European average financing for the judicial system is €60 per inhabitant a year, although there are countries at both extremes, six countries spending less than €6 and five others spending €100.
In parallel, users are paying more to finance judicial systems. In more than a quarter of countries, this contribution, which can take the form of taxes and charges for making use of the justice system, covers more than 20% of costs.
The figures are stable in terms of staff numbers, with 21 judges per 100,000 inhabitants. There are equal numbers of men and women employed as judges and prosecutors, but the glass ceiling remains in place for top jobs.
The number of courts is decreasing, while their size and specialisation are increasing and greater use is being made of information technology, which is described as not the only lever for boosting performance but which is nevertheless crucial these days. For the first time this year, there is a detailed report on IT, explaining equipment coverage and regulations governing IT use.
The CEPEJ also looks at the effectiveness of judicial systems and notes an increase in the number of criminal cases and a broadly positive trend in European courts’ capacity to deal with new cases over the long-term.
For civil justice, systems for dealing with cases in first instance are not keeping pace. The backlog of civil and trade cases has been increasing slightly since 2010, as has the ability of administrative justice to deal with the volume of cases.
It should be noted that all countries now have legal aid systems for criminal procedures, which was not the case ten years ago. Legal aid tends to spread to the domain of civil justice and the implementation of decisions.
The sixth of its type since the CEPEJ was set up in 2002, the report is now more than a snapshot, but provides follow-up and is a register of best practice, explained the chair of CEPEJ, Georg Stawa, so that politicians can make decisions in full awareness of systems set up elsewhere. The CEPEJ’s database was put online on Thursday and is accessible to all on the CEPEJ website. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)