Cyberjustice Europe Conference at the Seat of the Council of Europe

The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice of the Council of Europe (CEPEJ), organised jointly with the Institute of High Studies on Justice of France (IHEJ) and the Cyberjustice Laboratory of Montreal, a conference on Cyberjustice in Europe. This event took place on 5 December 2016, prior the 28th Plenary Meeting of the CEPEJ, at the Palais de l'Europe, headquarters of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

“What if the future of Courts was a question of managing change towards Cyberjustice?” was the question leading to the organisation of the conference. About fifty countries, as well as various European and international institutions and organisations, attended the conference. The UIHJ was represented by Sue Collins, Vice-President Delegate, and Mathieu Chardon, Secretary General. The opening ceremony was chaired by Hanne Juncher, Head of the Justice and Legal Cooperation Department of the Council of Europe. It included Georg Stawa, President of the CEPEJ, Harold Epineuse, Program Director at the IHEJ, Karim Benyekhlef, Director of the Cyberjustice Laboratory, Yannick Meneceur, Special Advisor to the CEPEJ Secretariat, and Sophie Sontag Koenig, Head of mission at IEHJ, CEPEJ Expert.

The day divided into seven sessions. Their aim was to provide participants with a global, practical, technical, legal, sociological and philosophical view of Cyberjustice. The topics covered were indeed very varied:
- What benefits can justice expect from an open government?
- Courts communicating live on the Web
- No Cyberjustice without Cybersecurity
- Implementing the “Distributed” Courtroom
- Tools of Predictive Justice
- Technology interactions in the courtroom
- Artificial Intelligence and the law: the dawn of a new era?

In its presentation program, the organisers of the conference argued that 2016 was the “year of a new era for judicial informatics”. The exceptional quality of the presentations, the diversity of the views expressed, the multidisciplinary visions presented by the experts, professors, professionals and practitioners, enabled the organisers of the conference to fully fulfil this objective.

A web video capture of the entire conference was performed. It will be available soon on the CEPEJ website.