Evaluation of European Judicial Systems

The statute of the CEPEJ emphasizes the comparison of judicial systems and the exchange of knowledge on their functioning. The scope of this comparison is broader than ‘just’ efficiency in a narrow sense: it also emphasizes the quality and the effectiveness of justice. In order to fulfil these tasks, the CEPEJ has undertaken a regular process for evaluating judicial systems of the Council of Europe’s member states.

Its Working Group on the evaluation of judicial systems (CEPEJ-GT-EVAL) is in charge of the management of this process. To facilitate the process of collecting and processing judicial data, an online electronic version of the Scheme has been created. Each national correspondent can thus accede to a secured webpage to register and to submit the relevant replies to the Secretariat of the CEPEJ. The 2012 Edition of the report is based on figures from 2010.

The report has been published on 20 September 2012, at the Minister’s of Justice Conference in Vienna (Austria). National replies also contain descriptions of legal systems and explanations that contribute greatly to the understanding of the figures provided. They are therefore a useful complement to the report, although because of the need to be concise and consistent, it was not possible to include all this information in this report. Thus, a genuine data base on the judicial systems of the Council of Europe’s member states is easily accessible to all citizens, policy makers, law practitioners, academicians and researchers. In the meantime, the States, if they wish, have the possibility to update some key data.

As for the previous cycle and from the information contained in the report, the CEPEJ wished to complete this stage of knowledge of the judicial systems by a stage of deepened analysis of some topics.

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