Three Questions to Georg Stawa, 4th President of the CEPEJ

 

On 12th December 2014, Georg Stawa (Austria), Vice-President of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice of the Council of Europe (CEPEJ), was unanimously elected President of this European institution for a two years term, after John Stacey.

On the day of his election, the UIHJ asked him the same three questions than to his predecessors.

Mr Stawa, you were elected this morning chair of the CEPEJ. What are your impressions?

After more than ten years being part of the CEPEJ-family I was really impressed by the level of trust.
I feel honoured and obliged at the same time to serve our community and the aims of CEPEJ.

What are your objectives for the next years?

When CEPEJ started more than a decade ago to improve efficiency of justice we had Evaluation Reports in mind, followed by developing tools and methods to identify gaps and needs of judiciary. But learning from the past is not giving answers for tomorrow at all: So I would like to see our understanding, models and methods developed further, providing court presidents, stakeholders and managers an early understanding of what's going on, before systems get out of trim.

Timelines will always be an ongoing demand to serve Art. 6 ECHR and the increasing expectations of parties and society as well. New techniques and innovative solutions are around to help to improve further, but it needs our expertise to give an idea of proper time-frames, their monitoring and their limits to ensure justice properly done.

But all these quantitative approaches have to be balanced by the quality of judiciary. It is even more important, if resources are cut, to be aware of the impact on quality. The ongoing development of quality criteria, measures, tools and even indicators to some extend are therefore a priority to highlight effects of politics and draw limits at the judge's independent desk.

During the former Presidencies and due to the excellent commitment of all members and experts, CEPEJ, our work and knowledge got widespread among the judicial community, politicians and institutions, interested to cooperate and share ideas with us. We are requested to cooperate in projects to improve judiciary in a win-win scenario of anybody involved.

We should continue in this spirit making CEPEJ what it always was best and is standing for: A friendly and dynamic market place of best-practises of judicial professionals having one thing in common: Improving the quality and efficiency of our judiciary to strengthen the court users' trust and confidence.

Once started to share problems, we should continue to share solutions!

How the occupation of judicial officer can fall under the work of the CEPEJ?

We all know that the most perfect court decision is not worth a Penny without the perspective of proper enforcement. Having this important issue in mind, the judicial officer, her/his tasks and service always was and will be part of our thinking at CEPEJ; not only in special events or working groups, but in a fruitful and active cooperation with UIHJ. I may explicitly thank UIHJ for being more than such an active “observer”, but will go on keeping this way of improving judicial service for our clients and citizens!

And the UIHJ is also looking forward to working with you and wishes you a fruitful mandate!