The Committee on Legal Affairs adopted the own-initiative report by Tadeusz ZWIEFKA (EPP, PL) on the EU Justice Scoreboard – civil and administrative justice in the Member States. It noted that the Commission has issued the EU Justice Scoreboard, which compared national justice systems using particular indicators, but did not present an overall ranking of national justice systems, and it called on the Commission to take this exercise forward. Members supported the aim of the exchange of best practices with a view to ensuring an efficient and independent justice system and believed that any comparison of national justice systems must be based on objective criteria. They asked the Commission to discuss the proposed method at an early date, in a transparent procedure involving the Member States.
Whilst praising the Commission’s efforts to provide measurable data, the report pointed out that certain goals, such as the quality and the impartiality of justice, were very difficult to measure objectively, nor could the effectiveness of the justice system be measured using statistically quantifiable parameters alone, but should also take into account structural peculiarities and differing social traditions in the Member States.
Member States were asked to examine the results of the 2013 Justice Scoreboard closely and to determine whether any consequences need to be drawn therefrom for the organisation and progress of their respective civil, commercial and administrative justice systems. The report also called for:
· Member States to collect relevant data on issues such as the cost of proceedings, mediation cases and enforcement procedures;
· encouraging mutual understanding and cooperation between national judicial systems, including by means of networks of contact judges;
· greater importance to be given to training programmes for judges, court staff and other legal practitioners, especially in the fields of European and comparative law;
· receiving data on cross-border cases, which often involved a greater degree of complexity than purely domestic cases and demonstrated the obstacles that EU citizens face when exercising their rights deriving from the EU single market, particularly in the application of EU law;
· giving consideration to cross-border mediation procedures in its next exercise of this kind, and Member States to actively promote mediation procedures with special regard to commercial matters and to family matters regulated at EU level (as in the cases of Rome III and Brussels II).
Lastly, Members felt that the EU institutions should seek to cooperate with the Council of Europe’s Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) since it provided an excellent basis for the exchange of best practices, and duplication needed to be avoided.