Strasbourg, 13 November 2007

CEPEJ(2007)25

European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ)

Objectives and methodology for a pilot peer review cooperation process on judicial statistics


Objectives

§  Supporting  CoE member states in:

-   improving the quality of their judicial statistics,

-   developing their statistics system so that judicial statistics at national level are in line with the common indicators defined through the CEPEJ's Evaluation Scheme.

§  Facilitating exchange of experiences between national judicial statistics systems, sharing good practices, identifying benchmarks and facilitating knowledge transfer.

§  Contributing to ensure the transparency and accountability of the CEPEJ process for evaluating European judicial systems and to improve the process.

Methodology

§  2 day peer expert visits (3 experts) to 3 pilot countries. Meetings with relevant administrative and judicial institutions to be able to fulfil the tasks mentioned below.

§  General analysis of the organisation of CEPEJ's data collection and transmission to the CoE's Secretariat, including inter alia information on:

-   the sources used by the national correspondents,

-   the main difficulties to fill the questionnaire.

§  Specific analysis of the practical way of responding to selected questions of the Evaluation Scheme and on the content of these answers, namely questions related to:

-   budgetary issues,

-   types (professional, lay judges) and number of judges,

-   litigious civil cases,

-   calculation methods of length of proceedings,

including information on the confidence intervals for such data.

§  Information on the overall technical way of collecting and processing judicial data, including:

-   the role of statisticians in this process;

-   the publicity given to the results of this process.

 

Outputs

 

§  Drafting of visit reports highlighting good practices and including recommendations for improving the collecting of homogenous information on judicial systems among CoE's member states. These reports should be endorsed by the CEPEJ.

At the end of the pilot exercise, the CEPEJ will assess the process with a view to enlarge it.