On 2 December 2020 the Commission adopted a package to modernise EU justice by boosting training of justice professionals.
The Commission set out ambitious targets in its European Judicial Training Strategy 2021-2024, published the Annual Report 2020 on European Judicial Training and launched a new European Training Platform.
Didier Reynders, Commissioner for Justice said: ”Fair and efficient justice depends on justice professionals whose knowledge, skills and tools are suited to face major 21st century challenges, such as the growing use of artificial intelligence for predictive justice or the urgent need to favour digital over paper. I trust that the package we adopted today will help to promote a common European judicial culture, based on the rule of law, fundamental rights and mutual trust. Efficient serving of justice across the EU will benefit our end users - companies and citizens.”
The package includes the following:
-The new EU Strategy on Judicial Training, which sets new, ambitious objectives to further improve justice professionals’ training on EU law and enlarges the training scope to new topics, such as digitalisation, artificial intelligence or judgecraft.
-The Annual Report 2020 on European Judicial Training, which shows that in 2019 more than 180,000 justice professionals – 12.9% of all EU justice professionals – were trained on EU law or on the law of another Member State. All in all, since 2011, 1.2 million justice professionals were trained on EU law, and the EU reached its target of training half of all legal practitioners in the EU already in 2017.
-European Training Platform for the justice professionals will also be able to search for training courses on EU law (test phase).
The Commission will organise an EU conference on judicial training in spring 2021, together with the Portuguese Presidency, which will be the occasion for all of us to discuss the paths to take in achieving our ambitious goals.
For more information on training of justice professionals and the newly adopted package, please visit the relevant pages on the EC website.