A New Year in Court Administration

International Journal for Court Administration

Journal comes during a time of great uncertainty and change. As the old Chinese curse goes, 'may we live in interesting times' (although the saying appears to be apocryphal, as no actual Chinese source has ever been cited, according to the reliable editors at Wikipedia). But these are interesting times indeed. We have compiled a collection of articles on court-related themes that have lurked in the background over the last few years, but have been pushed to the fore as a result of the global pandemic. These include the judiciary's perennial quest for independence, the erosion of political freedoms and civil liberties across the world, the increasing use of technology and artificial intelligence and their positive as well as negative impacts on society in general and court systems in particular.

2017

This paper raises some methodological issues when a comparative approach is used to compare the number of judges, court personnel, and court performance in European judiciaries. Data come from the Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) of the Council of Europe, which also is the main source for the European Union Justice Scoreboard. Some proposals are made to improve the collection of data and, then, increasing their comparability. The paper shows how an assessment on the number of judges and court personnel can benefit from a cross country comparative perspective, but only if quantitative analysis come together with in-depth qualitative studies. Este articulo plantea algunos problemas metodologicos que surgen cuando se abordan desde una perspectiva comparativa el numero de jueces, el personal judicial y la actuacion judicial en diferentes ambitos judiciales europeos. Los datos provienen de la Comision Europea para la Eficacia de la Justicia (CEPEJ, en ingles), del Consejo...

2012

With this issue of the Journal, the editors inaugurate the first of what over time will be a series of special issues of the IJCA. We take considerable pride in having organized this special issue reflecting recent research and scholarship by members of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) study group. We gratefully acknowledge the work of our reviewers, most of whom are members of ICJA's Editorial Board; our English-language proofreaders: and our Technical Editor, Linda Wade-Bahr, for compiling this special issue. The EGPA Study group on Justice and Court Administration conducted its inaugural conference in Bergen, Norway, in September. In response to our call for session papers, we received an unexpectedly large and fruitful yield, including a retrospective on court administration reform and modernization in Switzerland. Andreas Lienhard and Daniel Kettiger, from the Center of Competence for Public Management in Berne earlier received a significant grant for research on court administration. The Sinergia project, financed by the Swiss National Foundation, ongoing since 1 May 2012, will generate dissertations, articles, and other publications. The Sinergia project on court administration in Switzerland is connected to the EGPA Study Group.

Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG eBooks, 2021

The future of administration of justice is an issue increasingly often discussed in the literature. Representatives of the doctrine wonder about the greater use of new technologies in the judiciary, so as to, among other things, shorten the waiting time for a case to be decided by the court. Changes taking into account the wider use of new technologies are indispensable. Such a future has already been foreseen in the literature. The author reviews selected reported and functioning ideas, presents how the judicial field has changed recently and reflects on possible future solutions. The result of his observations is a conclusion about the need to discuss the future of justice on a broad, global scale.

The organisational system of judicial administration bears exceptional significance​ from the perspective of the quality of rule of law. One of the most formidable elements of the internal and external adjudication of a state is the intactness of the third branch of power, its effectiveness and its ability to guarantee individual rights. The conspicuously high level of inconsistency, the dynamism and the need for organisational change evident in the administration of the courts today teaches several lessons. On one hand, the classic principle of separation of powers and the stability of judicial independence do not rule out that the administrative solutions considerably deviate from one another. On the other hand, the organisational models are forced to adjust to environmental challenges, their own operational experiences, incidental failures and internal tensions. This process of adaptation is driven by well-defined principles: accountability and transparency, both having become equal to independence. The transformational crisis of the post-communist states coincides with the new wave of change in modern rule of law states.

International Journal for Court Administration, 2008

2007

International Journal for Court Administration, 2009

In 1993 it was for me the first time to be invited as an expert for the Council of Europe in the framework of developing the judiciaries in Central and Eastern Europe in 1993, to be followed by many other activities abroad to date. Prior to that time, although European judiciaries had some contact with each other, the contacts were not extensive because judicial structures and judicial management were regarded as a national issue. On this first occasion, I made two important observations I will never forget. First, my presentation on the role of the judge in a democratic society seemed to me as kicking in many wide open doors, but this appeared not to be the case. Secondly, my audience asked me how the situation on enforcement in The Netherlands was, which appeared to me as a rather strange question, as this is not a real problem in my country. Both aspects have in common, that matters that seems to be natural and going without saying, are not as natural as they seem. This article is written from the perspective of a court president in The Netherlands, a so called civil law country. In theory, in a civil law country, judges and lawyers in civil and commercial cases base their actions on the application of the law and its interpretation. Moreover, in criminal matters, the courts use inquisitorial procedures which differ from the adversarial procedures used in common law countries. The field of court management is not highly developed because of the tension between the need for judicial independence and judicial organization. There are many examples of this tension, including the fact that courts may be subject to budgetary limits which themselves may intrude upon judicial independence. For instance, suppose that a judge believes it necessary to appoint an expert to answer a certain scientific question, but the expert is expensive and budgetary considerations preclude the appointment. When I was involved in the process of the budgets of prosecutors' offices and courts, this question frequently arose. In an effort to deal with this problem, part of the courts' budgets were treated as open-ended even though courts rarely spent these open-ended budgets lavishly. This reminds of another question: who pays for the expenses in criminal cases including pretrial investigation. In fact, the prosecutor is the "interested party", but often the investigating judge decides on investigating measures, often rather costly, like hearing witnesses abroad, which requires the presence of the prosecutor and the clerk, but also the defense counsel of the accused. We found the practical solution that all costs in criminal cases are born by the prosecutors' office, as I said because it is their interest at stake, but also because a prosecutors' office is not there to win or to lose, but to guarantee a fair trial! Budgets This brings me automatically to the question of budgeting of courts (and prosecutors offices). For some reason this is always and everywhere a very sensitive issue, although the budget itself is relatively low. In The Netherlands the GDP amounts to almost of € 600 bn, while the total budget for the Ministry of Justice is € 5,7 bn, including the budget for the judiciary(courts only). The budget for the judiciary is € 800.000.000 or _+ 0,13% of the GDP., not a sensational proportion of the state budget I would say. To put matters in perspective, the total budget for the police agencies amounts to € 5.1 bn But nevertheless, often it seems that budgeting for the judiciary is something like making a walk with a tiny stone in your shoe. Governments may be reluctant to provide the judiciary with a large budget because they cannot be controlled. So, in the eyes of the Ministry of Justice or, rather, the Ministry of Finance, the judiciary may seem like a bottomless pit because it always seems to be asking for more money without explaining exactly what it will do with the extra money. At this point, it may be useful to explain how the judiciary is organized in The Netherlands. Apart from the Supreme Court, which is organized separately and has its own budget, all courts in The Netherlands are subject to the control of an independent body, the Council of the Judiciary. This Council is composed of five members, three of whom come from the judiciary and two of whom come from outside the judiciary. The members of the Council are appointed on proposal from the judiciary for a period of six years. The Council has a 100 person staff and makes a proposal to the Minister of Justice regarding its proposed budget for the following year. The minister of Justice is obliged to follow this proposal unless he asks Parliament for permission to deviate. The individual courts must report on their performance to the Council for the Judiciary, and their financial administration is subject to the review of an external auditor.