1. European e-Justice « Justice at a click »
Dick Heimans Deputy Head of Unit Criminal Law DG Justice

2. Agenda Introduction European e-Justice European e-Justice Portal
Interconnection Projects
Challenges & Recommendations

3. Introduction

4. European e-Justice Use of ICT at the service of judicial systems
Simplify procedures
Improve access to justice
Reduce costs

5. European e-Justice
More than 55% or citizens believe that it is « Fairly difficult » or even « Very difficult » to access civil justice in another Member State.
11.3 millions EU citizen live in a foreign MS.
10 millions EU citizen have been involved in cross border civil litigation.
Chart from eurobarometer, 2010

6. The European e-Justice Portal aims at…
Being a one stop shop for justice matters
Interconnecting existing national justice applications
Re-using and linking to existing information
Serving diverse stakeholders at EU level

7. But does not aim at… Replacing existing national solutions
Centralising more than necessary
Replacing or modifying existing offline procedures and practices
We do not want to rebuild what is already there.
Stakeholders remain sole owners of their content, even if it is hosted in the portal.
Procedures remain the same.

8. Single point for Justice e-Services Step by step approach
General Philosophy
Single point for Justice e-Services
Step by step approach
Multilingual from day one
Decentralised as much as possible
Ambitious!

9. Release 1 – 16th of July 2010 Information pages on 27 Member States
Available in 22 languages
Dynamic forms for civil instruments
Content Management System
Update of content
Notifications to registered users

11. Release 2 – November 2011 Redesigned homepage & user interface
New online forms
Victims’ and Defendants’ rights factsheets
IDOL 7 search engine integrated
IDOL 7 is an enterprise search engine built by Autonomy ( It is important in this case because it will, to a certain extent, allow indexing of external pages, so search queries made in the portal will return external links if they are relevant.

12. IDOL 7 is an enterprise search engine built by Autonomy (http://www
IDOL 7 is an enterprise search engine built by Autonomy ( It is important in this case because it will, to a certain extent, allow indexing of external pages, so search queries made in the portal will return external links if they are relevant.

13. Interconnection Projects
Insolvency Registers
Find a Lawyer
Find a Notary
European Case Law Identifier (ECLI)
Business Registers
Land Registers
Registers of Translators/Interpreters

14. Challenges Harmonised data set Data protection Interoperability
Translation
Different national approaches
E-Authentication, e-Identification
When interconnection of services is envisaged, it requires work from us, but also work for participating MS.
Find a common set of data in the domain worked on. Identify common data that is relevant for each MS.
Data protection rules vary from one Ms to the other.
Interoperability of the different technologies used by MS.
Translation should be kept in mind (part of the content will have to be translated.)

15. E-CODEX Project 14 MS - Commission support
Overall budget: 14 Million Euro
E-Authentication, e-Identification
Electronic filing, electronic transfer, electronic payment of court fees
Large scale pilot project e-Justice:
European Small Claims Procedure
European Order for Payment Procedure

16. Future Legislative proposal
Governance – decision making
Purpose
Scope
Responsibilities
Data Protection
Data Security
Costs

17. Thanks for your attention!