Digitalisation of Justice – feedback is open on the putative Commission’s Communication on a Digital Justice Strategy for 2025-2030

Joana Covelo de Abreu (Editor of this blog and Key-staff member of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence “Digital Citizenship & Technological Sustainability” – CitDig, Erasmus+. Project Assistant of the Jean Monnet Network ENDE)

A feedback period is open from the 26^th of May 2025 to the 23^rd of June 2025 concerning a call for evidence on a future Commission’s Communication establishing a strategy on Digital Justice for the time span of 2025-2030.

A call for evidence can be used when the European Commission exercises its right of initiative, as it is enshrined under Article 17 (1) of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU). Although it is usually mentioned in the context of the legislative procedure – since, for the most part, the European Commission is the institution with an independent power to bring legislative proposals to the equation –, this institution is entrusted with the task of planning, preparing and proposing all adequate initiatives to promote the general interest of the Union.

In this sense, a call for evidence must be used to define the scope of i) “a politically sensitive and/or important new law or policy”; ii) “an evaluation of an existing law or policy”; and iii) “a fitness check of a bundle of related existing laws and/or policies”.[1] A call for evidence aims at describing the problem that is justifying the Commission’s action, its objectives, while outlining “policy options”. In this particular action, no impact assessment is scheduled, especially since the Commission wants to see whether it will, in the last quarter of 2025, adopt a Communication (i.e., a non-legislative act) focusing on a Digital Justice Strategy for 2025-2030 (DigitalJustice@2023).

Concerning its political setting, the Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law and Consumer Protection, Michael McGrath,[2] established as an objective in its mission letter “the development of a strategy on the use of digital technologies including AI, to make EU civil and criminal justice systems more efficient, resilient and secure”.[3] While ascertaining that an effective justice is likely to promote EU competitiveness, as businesses will invest in countries whose justice system is efficient, the call for evidence underlines that the “COVID-19 crisis demonstrated that digitalised justice systems are more resilient to such systemic shocks, because judicial authorities could only perform tasks for which digital tools were available when sanitary measures were imposed.”[4] The foreseen Strategy will be adopted with the new Judicial Training Strategy (2025-2030) since, as judicial systems are becoming more digital, judicial operators need to acquire new skills and knowledge to accompany these developments.

This initiative aims at addressing some pressing issues:

• Member States’ efforts on justice digitalisation are uneven since, while some “have developed specific tools that partially digitalise their justice systems, such as case management systems, videoconferencing”, many have not yet done it;[5]

• Despite the fact that some relevant national initiatives on justice digitalisation might be resorting to common IT tools, there is not “a mechanism that allows the sharing of such IT tools” nor even a common knowledge of what actually has been done so far;

• The lack of an in-depth analysis and data concerning the efficiency, quality and independence of justice systems before these digitalisation efforts and to what extent they are capable of being interoperable;

• A still pending lack of transparency of national justice systems because legal rules, case law and judicial interpretation are not fully accessible to the general public and, prior to cross-border litigation, “it is not easy for justice professionals […] to find out, interpret and apply foreign laws in pending cases”, leading to delays in deciding pending cases;

• Judicial and related data “is not always accessible in machine-readable format”, posing difficulties on creating databases and search engines for judicial operators,[6] which can negatively impact on AI tools’ development as they have not relevant judicial data to resort to, especially for training purposes.

In view of these problems, the Commission is presented as being best placed to respond to the interest of national judicial operators and governments in “seeking to advance the use of digital tools and AI in justice”. [7]  In this particular context, the European Commission could provide adequate support for analysing existing digital standards between Member States and promoting the interoperability of existing systems.[8]

In this sense, the strategy will focus mainly on six possible workstreams: i) data on digitalisation of national justice systems and exchange of best practices; ii) IT/AI Toolbox for Justice; iii) AI in justice; iv) European Legal Data Space (ELDS); v) Digital court proceedings; vi) EU funding for digitalisation.

The first aims to establish the state of the art regarding national digital efforts in the field of justice, in order to promote the exchange of best practices and understand which systems can become interoperable. The second, third and fourth workstreams aim to understand what IT tools (including AI) exist in the EU, taking into account the EU framework stemming from the AI Act[9] and extending systematic access to EU and national legislation and case-law, so that legislative and judicial information can be used to shape and develop AI tools tailored to justice. To this end, the Commission would “help national authorities to make informed decisions on whether to use AI tools in justice, for which purpose and how”.[10] The fifth, focusing on digital court proceedings, aims to focus on pre-existing legal solutions to better pursue fully digitalised cross-border court proceedings. The latter aims at securing proper funding from the following multiannual financial framework (2028 onwards) to these new judicial options.

Concerning this initiative, and understanding its importance in hastily aligning judicial modernisation – using digital and technological tools – with the reaffirmation of the dimensions of effective judicial protection, we can attempt to understand a political trend in this domain, with two main consequences:

• The first one is by understanding that, within the justice domain, digitalisation is “the most obvious gravitational axis of the Union’s legislative policy”:[11] to some extent, by adopting Regulations and Directives (as Regulation 2023/2844[12] and Directive 2023/2843,[13] which established the Package on judicial cooperation digitalisation), but also adopting political and institutional acts and incrementing EU funding in this domain (as, in fact, duly addressed in the analysed call for evidence). In this sense, “[t]he European Union cannot impose the digitization of civil proceedings at national level, because it would be exceeding its competences” but “it has been developing its own e-Justice policy for a long time now, with approaches that have evolved and gone beyond the merely European cross-border dimension”.[14] In fact, cross-border solutions have to rely on pre-existing mechanisms that are used to the day-to-day running of the justice system: in this sense, “even if the EU were to limit itself to promoting digitization only in relation to cross-border litigation, it would also be promoting it, albeit indirectly, at the purely internal level”.[15] This becomes more visible since, looking at the call for evidence, it is expressly mentioned as a problem that must be tackled the fact that the Regulation 2023/2844 “does not digitalise all judicial procedures from the launch of a court case to its conclusion”, providing “very little guidance on technical and procedural requirements”.[16] In this sense, the future efforts will be also focused on creating a common ground for the digitalisation of justice, which will evenly impact in all Member States’ judicial systems, regardless of whether or not they are mechanisms for judicial cooperation in cross-border litigation.

• The second one is related to the fact that all current efforts concerning justice digitalisation are based on a common path for the EU’s civil and criminal justice systems. From the use of interoperable solutions aimed at dealing with procedural demands on civil, commercial and criminal matters to these new approaches concerning updating judicial systems in the face of new and disruptive technologies, the road has been paved for some time to actively lead to an effective judicial integration, which goes beyond a mere cooperation between Member States and their respective judicial authorities. This is – perhaps due to this digitalisation process aimed at the judicial systems – the era of empirical demonstration that we are living in the time of judicial integration, in which civil/commercial and criminal matters are, within the EU legal order, seeking intertwined procedural solutions, especially in digital domains.

[1] European Commission, Planning and proposing law, in https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/planning-and-proposing-law_en#how-their-scope-is-defined [access: 29.05.2025].

[2] See, for further details, European Commission, Michael McGrath, in https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-commissioners/michael-mcgrath_en [access: 30.5.2025].

[3] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, in https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14517-Digital-Justice-strategy-for-2025-2030_en [access: 29.05.2025], 1.

[4] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 1.

[5] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 1.

[6] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 1 and 2.

[7] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 2.

[8] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 2.

[9] Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonized rules on artificial intelligence and amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act).

[10] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 2.

[11] See Fernando Gascón Inchausti, “The new regulation on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation in the European Union: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”, ERA forum 24 (2024): 535-552, 536, in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12027-024-00782-z [access: 30.5.2025].

[12] Regulation (EU) 2023/2844, of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 13 December 2023, on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation and access to justice in cross-border civil, commercial and criminal matters, and amending certain acts in the field of judicial cooperation.

[13] Directive (EU) 2023/2843, of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 13 December 2023, amending Directives 2011/99/EU and 2014/41/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council, Council Directive 2003/8/EC and Council Framework Decisions 2002/584/JHA, 2003/577/JHA, 2005/214/JHA, 2006/783/JHA, 2008/909/JHA, 2008/947/JHA, 2009/829/JHA and 2009/948/JHA, as regards digitalisation of judicial cooperation.

[14] See Fernando Gascón Inchausti, “The new regulation on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation in the European Union: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”, 536.

[15] See Fernando Gascón Inchausti, “The new regulation on the digitalisation of judicial cooperation in the European Union: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”, 536.

[16] European Commission, Call for evidence for an initiative (without an impact assessment), Ares(2025)421516 – 26.05.2025, 1.

Picture credit: by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on pexels.com.