Context of the Action
The action responds directly to the call made in the Joint Communication on the future of the Eastern Partnership beyond 2020 for renewed commitment to the fundamentals of the partnership, including proposing ways to better measure the impact of judicial reforms. It will therefore provide quantitative and qualitative data on the functioning of the judicial systems that will allow for a better measurement of the results of the justice reform efforts supported by the European Commission in the Eastern Partnership. Consequently, this Action will be a key tool in the context of the upcoming European Union-EaP post-2020 policy objectives. This action is cofounded by the European Union and the Council of Europe and implemented by the Council of Europe.
Objectives of the Action
The overall objective of the Action is to support the Eastern partner countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine ) in their efforts to achieve an effective, systematic and data-based monitoring and evaluation on the quality, efficiency, independence and accountability of their justice systems, including the prosecution services. This, in turn, will allow the partner countries to assess the impact of their judicial reform efforts.
- The Action will help, in particular : to improve the mechanism of collection, processing and analysis of judicial data in accordance with CEPEJ standards and tools in the EaP countries;
- to build the capacity of the EaP countries to identify and take into account the strengths and weaknesses of their judicial system and the results of the judicial reforms.
Methodology of data collection
The CEPEJ will collect annually data on the functioning of the justice system in each beneficiary. The methodology for the collection and quality check of data used by the CEPEJ in Evaluation cycles apply to this exercise. Each beneficiary appoints a Justice Eap Dashboard correspondent entrusted with the collection and coordination of the replies to the CEPEJ Dashboard Eap Questionnaire, through the electronic system: CEPEJ-COLLECT. This correspondent is the unique interlocutor of the CEPEJ Secretariat during the whole process. The CEPEJ Questionnaire contains questions from the general CEPEJ evaluation cycles, and some additional questions specific for this Action, some defined in liaison with the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Department for the execution of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. The CEPEJ Dashboard Eap Questionnaire is accompanied by an explanatory note to ensure comparability of data collected through this process. Extensive work is carried out by the Action team responsible for the data collection within the CEPEJ secretariat to verify the quality of the data submitted by the project correspondents.
Beneficiary countries
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.