The Council of Europe’s European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) has set out the main trends of the judicial systems of 44 European countries and 3 observer States (*) in a report, country profiles and an interactive database (all publicly available). This evaluation report, the tenth since CEPEJ was established in 2002 shows in particular the following trends:
Regarding the budget allocated to justice:
- between 2010 and 2020, states show a steady but uneven increase; in 2020 they spend on average €79 per inhabitant on the judicial system (i.e. €7 more than in 2018);
- 66% of this budget are allocated to courts, 24,5% to prosecution authorities and 9,5% to legal aid;
- between 2018 and 2020, the most significant percentage increase, equal to 12% on average, has been recorded for the public prosecution budget;
Regarding justice professionals and the courts:
- the number of professional judges in the member States and entities has slightly increased (the average being 22,2 judges per 100 000 inhabitants) with significant disparities between the states and entities that can be partly explained by the diversity of judicial organisations, geographic factors and/or the evolution of European legal systems;
- the ratio between salaries of judges and average national salaries shows significant disparities in Europe: from 1.0/1.7 in Germany (at the beginning/the end of the career) to 6.8/21.6 in Ukraine (at the beginning/the end of the career); the same goes for public prosecutors: from 0,8 in Ireland to 4,1 in Albania at the beginning of the career and from 1,7 in Germany and Luxembourg to 7,8 in Georgia at the end of career; in general and for different reasons, public prosecutors’ salaries are lower than those of judges;
Regarding justice users:
- the Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the central place of the users in the justice system, implying new challenges to access justice, new ways of communication and delivery of judicial services and acceleration of the digitalisation of justice;
- more and more states adapt the specific information to the different categories of users, in particular the most vulnerable;
Regarding information and communication technology (ICT):
- CoE member States and entities increasingly deploy ICT to support judicial activity and they allocate a greater percentage of courts’ budget to computerisation compared to previous years;
Regarding the performance of judicial systems:
- because of Covid-19 restrictions, courts throughout Europe encountered problems in executing even routine operations; however, not all jurisdictions were impacted in the same manner as states and entities resorted to various innovative measures to mitigate the Covid-19 effects;
- courts seem to be fastest in resolving criminal law cases while in the administrative matters they are seen as the least efficient.
