Judicial Officers Screened by the CEPEJ

A Report on the Evaluation of Legal Systems in Europe

The agenda established by CEPEJ President Fausto De Santis and Stéphane Leyenberger, secretary of the CEPEJ, included as a major topic the evaluation of legal systems with the presentation of the 2008 edition of the report by Mrs. Marta Zimolac, scientific expert.
This major document joined together about fifteen chapters, laid out in various parts, with a first part reserved for the presentation of the heading, then with a series of tabulated statistics followed by explanatory comments.
The aim of the authors of the report consisted in revising the former studies for better preparing a standard form questionnaire which will facilitate the making of future reports.
The final document presented at the time of the 11th session had the advantage of gathering a broad study insofar as 45 States (out of the 47 countries of the Council of Europe) had answered, more or less completely, the last questionnaire, representing a population of 796 million people.
The report was abundantly centered on statistics although their authors were reserved in their conclusions as certain points were likely to be corrected according to internal elements, often difficult to control - through questionnaires -, even if a particular care was brought to clarify certain answers, “the goal being to give an overall picture of the situation of the European systems”.

Difficulties in Evaluating the Good Enforcement of Legal Decisions

Among the various points approached, a special attention must be brought to chapter 11 of the report, on enforcement of legal decisions.
This part of the study starts by pointing out the definition given of enforcement by recommendation 17 of 9 September 2003 (Rec (2003) 17): “the putting into effect of judicial decisions, and also other judicial or non-judicial enforceable titles in compliance with the law which compels the defendant to do, to refrain from doing or to pay what has been adjudged”.
It is difficult, according to the experts, to evaluate the good enforcement of decisions on the basis of relevant statistics because enforcement is not automatic, which leads the analysts to concentrate more on the organization of enforcement and the role of enforcement agents. The CEPEJ nevertheless tried to evaluate the duration of the enforcement procedures in a reasonable time.
One will note, according to the European organization, that an enforcement agent is defined (Rec (2003) 17) as “a person authorised by the state to carry out the enforcement process irrespective of whether that person is employed by the state or not”. According to the report the 47 Member States would gather 62.000 agents (evaluation 2006).
The document puts forward the diversity of the bodies intervening in enforcement: judges, mixed systems (private and public agents), legal agents and enforcement solicitors, Tax enforcement agents, notary public, sheriffs - “distrainers” in Slovakia, etc
It is explained that the statute of enforcement agents varies and that certain States do not have an enforcement profession. This comes as a surprise, not concerning States such as Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, which are unknown to the UIHJ, but being Denmark, which is quoted, we believe that the “foeged” are within our organization.
As regards the level of training of judicial officers the report stipulates that a good qualification of enforcement agents is fundamental to reach the anticipated result (a good enforcement of legal decisions) while strictly respecting the rights of parties and third parties. Thus it is required that enforcement agents are titular of a legal diploma which, without being inevitably as demanding as those necessary to the exercise of the functions of a Judge or a Lawyer, must be sufficient to make it possible for the interested party to apprehend the various enforcement methods and usefully being able to inform citizens. In addition of this requirement, the realization of a practical training course is sometimes added. 34 States (that is to say 70%) indicated that an initial of specific training or a specific examination was required to join the profession of enforcement agent.

A Commission for the Enforcement of Legal Decisions

Finally, the last interesting part of the report (which comprises still many but which cannot be included in this article) concerns the time for serving legal decisions relating to the covering of a debt. We reproduce hereafter the table of these deadlines:

Finally President De Santis was to announce the constitution within the CEPEJ of a commission for studying the enforcement of legal decisions. On this project the UIHJ will obviously be very attentive.