Meeting at the Directorate Justice of the European Commission in Brussels On 14 November 2011

The President and the Secretary General of the UIHJ met Lotte Knudsen (Director of the Directorate Criminal Justice), Amélie Leclercq (project manager for the European Judicial Training, Directorate General Justice, European Commission), Emmanuelle Cretin-Magand (Policy Officer, European Training Training, European Commission) and Jacek Gartska (Legal Officer Civil Justice Policy).

After a presentation of the UIHJ and its actions (including training and the creation of a World Code of Enforcement) by Leo Netten, Lotte Knudsen recalled that today justice has taken on a new and more important dimension in Europe. It was valued especially after the creation of an independent Justice Directorate (separate from the Directorate Justice-Freedom-Security) under the impulse of Viviane Reding, Vice-President of the European Commission.
There is now a real Justice program and a genuine commitment to involve stakeholders, for example through the Justice Forum, in which the UIHJ is involved, but also through training. The European Commission wants to create a real and practical follow-up on training.

President Netten said that one of the objectives of the UIHJ is the harmonization of the profession of judicial officers and that training was indeed way to achieve this goal. Today, large customers are international. They need to find the same guarantees in all countries and enforcement should be entirely conducted by judicial officers while the judge should be released from this task.
He recalled that the UIHJ worked within the Council of Europe, in the CEPEJ Working Group and participated in the drafting of the Guidelines on a better implementation of Recommendation Rec(2003)17 of 9 September 2003, which guidelines are the basic tool of harmonization of the profession of judicial officer in Europe.
He also referred the BERP project (Balkans Enforcement Reforms Project) - in which the UIHJ experts have worked and especially our Dutch colleague Jos Uitdehaag - and the introduction of harmonized enforcement procedures in the countries party to this project. The UIHJ promotes a system where the judicial officer is a liberal, has a powerful training, a strong ethics and a powerful control.

Françoise Andrieux presented the European Training days organized by the Institute Jacques Isnard via the International Training Centre. After recalling the articulation of these days and the topics she discussed the possibility of organizing an inter-professional training day in 2012.

The presentation of the current situation as regards training in Europe was handed to Lotte Knudsen. She said the position paper written in response to the Commission communication on training by the UIHJ was much appreciated by Commissioner Reding in particular. Netten President addressed the topic of e-Justice, a key topic for the future of our profession. He presented the Federation of Trusted Third Parties (FNTC) of which the UIHJ is a member.

 

Collaborative projects for the development of training modules have been discussed with Jacek Gartska, Amélie Leclercq and Emmanuelle Cretin-Magand. An agenda of work meetings is to be finalysed to implement this project.