European Expertise & Expert Institute

EEEI FACTSHEET

The European Expertise and Expert Institute (EEEI) was established in 2006 to contribute to the convergence on core principles of the EU’s national systems of judicial expertise, and to guarantee the legal certainty of court rulings across the European judicial area by ensuring the high quality of court-appointed expertise in different aspects. EEEI brings together from each Member State of the European Union contributors experts, expert organizations, appeal courts, bar associations, and universities and other professionals with a stake in these issues. As such it functions as a think-tank at European judicial scale and is also a cross-professional, cross-border platform for debate and by no means a representative body for experts. The EEEI is completely independent of all public authorities and its work contributes to emergence of consensual solutions that are to be ultimately transposable to the various European law systems.

Since more than 5 years, the EEEI has been appointed by the CEPEJ – Council of Europe – as observer in the Working Groups GT-QUAL and GT-EVAL. EEEI collaborates on the study of civil and criminal legal expertise and has contributed to the drafting of the guidelines for judicial expertise, adopted in December 2014 and published in January 2015.

In 2010-2012, with the contribution of the Network of the Presidents of the Supreme Courts of the European Union and the financial support of the European Commission (DG Justice), the EEEI made a detailed, comparative inventory of existing procedures about judicial expertise in civil matters. This EUREXPERTISE study was concluded by an International Symposium held in Brussels on 16th and 17th March 2012 on “The Future of Civil Judicial Expertise in the European Union”.

In 2014, the EEEI launched a new research, co-funded by the European Commission, to create a guide to best practices in European civil judicial expertise within a project called EGLE, for European Guide for Legal Expertise. For the EGLE project, the method of the consensus conference was chosen. It is based on the competence and cooperation of professionals and the sharing of comparative experience. The method has appeared well-suited to draw up a common practice directly inspired by the rules of fair trial laid down by European legislation and case law. This work culminated in the public, plenary conference on May 29th 2015 in the Aula Magna of the Italian Supreme Court in Rome, which, by all accounts was a great success. Experts, judges, lawyers, and academics, as well as representatives from Supreme Courts and other European and international institutions, in all, 160 people from 22 countries contributed to the consensus conference. Based on the preparatory work and on the debates during the plenary conference, a Jury of key European professionals met at regular intervals to draw up the final report containing the Guide to Best Practices.

To date more than 15 000 copies of the Guide have been distributed into 8 languages. It is now commented and published by Bruylant.

Current EEEI projects:

➢ Find an Expert, creation of a European directory of experts that could be published on the website of e-Justice of the European Union. we benefit from a co-financing which allows the EEEI to continue the creation of this directory thanks to the work of European volunteers.

➢ Training: The EEEI has launched pilot projects to train lawyers in judicial expertise. Discussions are ongoing to extend this process to judicial training. Quite quickly we will extend these projects to as many countries in the Union as possible. Once these pilot projects are operational, the EEEI will start training experts involved in judicial procedures within the Union. This project will accompany our ongoing efforts to harmonize procedures.

➢ EurexCrim, inventory and harmonization of expertise procedures for criminal justice, as well as the exchange of information between the judicial systems of European countries. Following the non-acceptance of the co-funding of this project by the European Commission we are working again on this theme in order to present a new application. We will probably have to wait until the next European elections in 2019.

➢ EERE: European Electronic Registers of Experts In the frame of its action plan for 2019-2023, e-justice has asked us to conduct a project with the final goal of creating national electronic directories of judicial experts and implementing a search tool interconnecting these directories on the ejustice portal. This project will be carried out in partnership with EuroExpert.

For more information: www.experts-institute.eu