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Iuliia TKACHENKO

Modified 1 Year ago.

The CEPEJ pilot court Network met in Lublin - Poland

The CEPEJ held the 16th plenary meeting of its Network of pilot courts in Lublin, Poland, on 30 March 2023 upon the invitation of the District Court of Lublin-East, namely its President Mr. Marek Mielnik, and Mr Paweł Wrzaszcz, Rechtspleger. The Network was hosted by the Andrzej Herbet, Dean of the Faculty of Law, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin as well as the Marcin Romanowski, Deputy Minister of Justice, Poland. 31 pilot courts from Europe participated in the meeting.

Francesco Depasquale, President of the CEPEJ, and Giacomo Oberto, President of the Working Group on Judicial Time Management (CEPEJ-SATURN) also welcomed the participants and led the debates.

The Network of CEPEJ Pilot Courts is a platform for the exchange of practices in the field of efficiency and quality of justice, but also a forum for reflection on the ongoing work within the CEPEJ and the implementation of its tools. It meets every year.

In their opening remarks, the speakers highlighted the importance of the contribution of the Network to the work of the CEPEJ to meet today’s challenges faced by justice systems. These challenges primarily relate to the digitalisation of justice systems with an increased use of Artificial Intelligence.

Different workshops were organised on topics on which the CEPEJ currently works and where it needed inputs from the pilot courts. The three main topics discussed were measures to evaluate the quality performance of judges, fight backlogs of cases and reduce the excessive workload in the courts.

The workshops provided participants with an opportunity to present their court practices and learn through direct exchanges with peers. The discussion also helped to shape the future CEPEJ tools and guidelines. The discussions showed that delivering quality justice within a reasonable time is a top priority for all judicial systems in Europe.

There are different organisational and procedural measures that courts can implement to successfully resolve backlogs and prevent their future formation. These measures can be taken on the system-wide level, but also by courts themselves or even by individual judges. Increased recourse to alternative dispute resolution, information and communication technologies and transfer of tasks from judges to other persons or institutions could relieve the courts from their workload.

On the margins of this meeting, the Working Group on judicial time management (CEPEJ-SATURN) held its 34^th meeting. The discussions focused on the topics, such as case weighting in public prosecution services, backlog reduction, length of the various stages of civil proceedings and on-line training course on judicial time management and their good practices. The CEPEJ-SATURN adopted the Time Management Checklist and its Explanatory Note to help the competent judicial authorities to collect data and enable them to monitor and analyse the functioning of justice systems.