e-justice - Justice 2009

e-Justice

Just imagine one single place on the Internet where you can find all necessary information about access to justice within the entire European Union. On one site you could find the address of a competent court in Poland, search information about bankruptcy of a company in Austria in an insolvency register, then you could contact an interpreter in Hungary and send a form with a request for the European payment order to be issued in Germany. All of this available online, in all official languages of the European Union. Without long lasting searches on ten different sites.
You think this is an image from a distant future?

Works on the preparation of the European e-Justice portal, which should provide all these services, represent the content of one of the priorities of the Ministry of Justice for the Presidency of the Czech Republic in the EU Council. Following the activities of previous Presidencies and already existing pilot projects of interconnection of electronic judicial registers, the Czech Republic will try to go on in developing the e-Justice portal in such a manner to enable it to be prepared and accessible for citizens before the end of 2009.

Some specific functions of the European e-Justice portal are already under construction:

• Information about national and European legislation (based on links to existing databases Eur-lex and N-lex, which should contain legislation in national languages with improved search tools to find documents).
• Access to case law (national as well as European, concerning a specific legislation of European law).
• Interconnection of electronic judicial registers (a.o. insolvency registers, business registers – by a link to European business register EBR, cadastre register – by a link to EULIS database, integrated database of experts and interpreters)
• Easy use of videoconference facilities (not only) in cross-border cases (the Czech Presidency would like to contribute by creating of an address list of all videoconference facilities in the judicial area in all Member States and prepare a booking application for videoconferences which should facilitate mutual communication among courts).
• Use of information already available within the framework of the European judicial network in criminal matters and European judicial network in civil matters (including the Judicial Atlas).
• Provide information on electronic possibilities to receive legal aid or mediation.
• Introduction of an interactive usage of standardized forms for direct communication with courts while initiating procedures for e.g. European payment order or small claims procedure.

During its Presidency, the Ministry of Justice of the Czech Republic would also like to make a presentation of national technical solutions for introducing electronic services in the justice area (these are infoCourt, infoHearing, eOfficialBoard and eFiling – all integrated on the Czech national judicial portal www.justice.cz.) and to pass the know-how to countries planning to create this kind of electronic functionalities as well. The Czech Republic is summarizing information on whether similar services already exist in other Member States and is willing to help countries who are interested in their launch.