Over the next five years, the European Commission’s DigitalJustice@2030 strategy aims to develop the way in which courts operate, unify digital solutions and provide a framework for the use of artificial intelligence within the courts.
This package, presented on Thursday 20 November, would be a further step forward for the European Union in making justice more efficient, accessible and resilient in the face of digital transformations.
In its communication, the Commission points out that European competitiveness is increasingly correlated with the ability of public authorities, including the justice system, to offer high-quality digital services.
The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the limits of processes that were still too dependent on paper and face-to-face contact.
The package comprising the DigitalJustice@2030 strategy and the European judicial training strategy 2025-2030 should be able to remedy this.
The aim is to lay the foundations for accelerating the digital transformation of national courts. Rather than multiplying technical initiatives with no overall coherence, the chosen approach aims to ensure that the digital justice tools developed in different countries can be understood and work together.
In this way, the Commission wishes to facilitate the sharing of experience between Member States.
In addition, the responsible use of artificial intelligence, seen as contributing to a certain efficiency through automatic transcription, document analysis or the organisation and prioritisation of files, is one of the major issues.
But the Commission explicitly states that artificial intelligence must remain a complementary support tool and never replace human decision-making. Considered under the conditions of the regulation on artificial intelligence (AI Act), its development in the judicial sector cannot go ahead without genuine guarantees and consideration of the associated risks.
The package must support the European Legal Data Space in order to improve access to national and European legislation and case law - both to provide professionals with more transparent access to texts and decisions - and the creation of AI tools designed specifically for the judicial field.
In addition, the Commission will analyse the possibilities for interoperability of cross-border judicial videoconferencing and will consider the full digitalisation of civil and commercial proceedings.
The financing of this transformation is also one of the main elements of the communication, which argues that the next multiannual financial framework should allow for a significant increase in the resources dedicated to the digitalisation of justice (see EUROPE 13701/8).
For its part, the 2025-2030 training strategy should enable judges, prosecutors and court staff to acquire the skills they need to make effective use of the new digital case management tools.
DigitalJustice@2030 is part of the pursuit of the ambitions of the Digital Decade (https://aeur.eu/f/jk8 ) and should enable the European Union to benefit from a faster, more accessible justice system capable of making full use of digital tools and artificial intelligence, without compromising legal certainty and the protection of fundamental rights.
Links to the communications: https://aeur.eu/f/jkc ; https://aeur.eu/f/jkb (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)