1. European e-Justice Portal « Justice at a click »
European Union Information Challenges 2011
Zagreb, 25 October 2011
Tomasz Debski, European Commission, DG Justice

2. 2. European e-Justice Portal 3. Short and long term perspectives
4. European e-Justice and Croatia

3. e-Justice – what and why
Use of ICT in the area of Justice in order to:
rationalise and simplify judicial procedures
Help justice to be administered more effectively
Improve access to justice - especially for individuals

4. European e-Justice – what and why
Creation of the European Single Market
Increase of cross-border relations within Europe
Consequent increase in transnational procedures

5. European e-Justice – what and why (cont.)
11.3 million non-national EU citizens residing in another EU MS
About 10 million EU citizens have been involved in cross-border civil litigation
Over half (56%) of EU citizens believe that it is either ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ difficult to access civil justice in another EU Member State
Eurobarometer 2010

6. The added value of European e-Justice
Facilitate access to justice, especially in cross-border proceedings
Provide Citizens, Businesses, the Judiciary and Legal Practitioners with a single point of access to information, exchange of data and existing ICT systems
Catalyst of enabling and streamlining the interconnection of national e-Justice systems
Contribute to the overall European Judicial Area

7. Some of the guiding principles for European e-Justice
Decentralised approach
One-stop shop approach - provision of single point e-services
Modular, step-by-step
Ambitious!
Inclusive in nature (many actors): for all MS
Multilingual: ALL official languages of the EU

8. Institutional background
EUROPEAN E-JUSTICE
LEGAL BASIS –
2012
Commission Communication: Towards a European strategy on e-Justice – May 2008
Council European e-Justice Action Plan – November 2008
European Parliament Resolution on e-Justice – December 2008
Stockholm Programme adopted by the EU Parliament – December 2009

9. First major milestone for European e-Justice
European e-Justice Portal
went live on 16 July 2010

11. The Portal – roles and actors
Page ownership: depending on content
General ownership of pages: shared MS/COM
Development: European Commission
Decisions: Member States (Council)

13. The Portal - technology behind it
How we think:
Decentralise as much as possible
Store as little personal data as possible
Security and privacy by design
Distributed architecture – scalability in view of growth
Proven commercial off-the-shelf products (J2EE - JBoss, MySQL/Oracle, Alfresco CMS)
How we communicate:
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) - XML, SOAP/WSDL web-services (or potentially CORBA)

14. The Portal – Release 1
Focus on information - 12,000+ pages of content in 22 EU official languages
Online dynamic forms concerning European civil instruments
Several features for the registered users
Custom based Content Management System
Sophisticated Portal Management Module

15. The Portal – Release 2 (to be live in two weeks time)
New homepage
Revamped user interface (UI)
Accessibility improvements
IDOL 7 search engine and improved search capabilities
New online forms accompanied by the Wizard
Victims’ and Defendants’ rights factsheets

17. The Portal – future releases (short term – 2011/2012)
Content wise
European Judicial Network in Civil and Commercial Matters website migration (already spring 2011)
Judicial ATLAS migration
Search in external (justice related) repositories
Various improvements + content items

18. The Portal – future releases (short term – 2011/2012)
Dynamic functionalities
Find a lawyer
Find a notary
Insolvency registers interconnection
European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) search interface
Court database

19. The Portal – future releases (longer term) Dynamic functionalities
Find a bailiff
Translators and interpreters database
Interconnection of business registers
Interconnection of land registers

20. Our biggest challenges
The ‘e’s we need for e-Justice:
e-ID so that users can authenticate
e-Signature for judicial proceedings
e-Payment for payment of court fees or during judicial procedures (small claims, etc.)
e-Delivery (exchange of documents)
EU-wide interoperability

21. e-CODEX (e-Justice Communication via Online Data Exchange)
Largescale ICT policy support programme
€15million value
Began January 2011, three-year duration
Consortium members: 14 MS: AT, BE, CZ, EE, FR, DE, GR, HU, IT, MT, NL, PT, RO, ES and TU, CCBE and CNUE

22. e-CODEX is supposed to:
Establish common specifications for an interoperability layer
Come up with building blocks reusable by all
Collaborate with and reuse results of previous major pilot projects (e.g. STORK, PEPPOL, etc.)
Be compliant with the EU legal framework
Provide solutions which must be non-discriminatory, generally available and interoperable.

23. SUMMARY The Portal aims to… It does not aim to… 12/14/2017
Become a one stop electronic shop on all justice-related matters
Interconnect existing national IT justice applications, registers and databases
Re-use and link to existing information
Serve diverse stakeholders on EU level
It does not aim to…
Replace existing national solutions or any registers or databases
Centralise data more than necessary
Replace existing (offline) procedures or practices 23

24. European e-Justice and Croatia

25. Want to get more? Register in the e-Justice Portal to:
Personalise the Portal
Receive notifications on latest updates
Receive notifications on published news

26. Contact us https://e-justice.europa.eu Tomasz.Debski@ec.europa.eu

27. Any questions?