European e-Justice Strategy and Action Plan 2019-2023

KEY POINTS

e-Justice

• The aim of e-justice is to improve and simplify access to information in the field of justice, as well as to support the digitalisation of cross-border judicial and extrajudicial procedures. It is not limited to one particular field of law and includes a wide variety of stakeholders.
• The European e-Justice Portal is a single, multilingual, user-friendly access point to the European e-justice system. It is the main tool developed for improving access to information in the field of justice at European level. It also includes a number of functionalities and interactive electronic services, i.e. tools to find a lawyer and a company, interactive forms supporting EU legal procedures, etc.
• European e-Justice is consistent with the general framework of eGovernment and the European Interoperability Framework and is based on:
  • voluntary action;
  • decentralisation;
  • interoperability (i.e. the ability of information communication technology systems and of the business processes they support to exchange data and to enable the sharing of information and knowledge);
  • the European dimension (in civil, criminal and administrative law).

European e-Justice achievements include:

• an information hub on European and national justice matters, including the content of the European Judicial Network in civil and commercial matters;
• pilot projects involving EU countries, e.g. e-CODEX (secure exchange of legal data);
• interconnection of national databases (insolvency registers, business registers, ‘Find a lawyer’, ‘Find a notary’, etc.);
• the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and the ECLI search engine.

European e-Justice Strategy

The 2019-2023 Strategy builds on the 2014-2018 Strategy and aims to further improve access to justice by continuing digitalisation in the field of justice. It is consistent with the principles and objectives of European e-Justice, and ties in with the more specific aims set out in the Action Plan. The Strategy defines 3 main areas:

• access to information;
• e-communication in the field of justice; and
• interoperability.

Access to information

The Action Plan includes projects to improve:

• general information in the field of justice — further developing the e-Justice Portal;
• access to data sets — providing data relevant for the access to justice;
• access to legal information — improving the EUR-Lex website, interlinking legal data, defining the role and applications of artificial intelligence in the field of justice.

e-Communication

The Action Plan includes projects to improve:

• secure exchange of data — developing an option for electronic payment of court fees, and the possibility to communicate online with the judicial or national authorities of the EU countries through the e-Justice Portal;
• secure communication between citizens, practitioners and judicial authorities — further developing tools for direct communication between citizens, legal practitioners, the judiciary and national authorities, for example, via cross-border videoconferencing.

Interoperability

The Action Plan includes projects to develop:

• e-CODEX — maintaining the e-CODEX system and implementing pilot projects for the exchange of forms, documents and structured data through the system;
• semantic interoperability — allowing communication between different systems by:
  • aligning the terms used and using voice recognition tools to allow automatic transcription of speech;
  • developing an indexing tool for EuroVoc; and
  • expanding LegiVoc.