12 aprilie 2018
Find an Expert - questionnaire by the Civil Justice Programme of the European Union
Dear Sir/Madam,
As part of its “e-justice” programme, the European Commission is financing a project called FIND AN EXPERT, in order to centralise the existing directories of expert witnesses/registered experts in the EU Member States. This will enable legal professionals worldwide to access experts from multiple disciplines on a national or regional basis.
This “FIND AN EXPERT” project is being led by the European Expertise and Expert Institute (EEEI), whose stakeholders have a thorough knowledge of Member States' judicial expertise systems through its previous EUREXPERTISE and EGLE projects. For this project, the EEEI is collaborating with several Ministries of Justice in Europe and associations of accredited experts.
The first phase of this project is to gather information on current practices and registers as they apply to judicial experts/ experts collaborating with courts in each Member State. This will be done via a questionnaire which will be sent to representative contacts within the world of law and judicial expertise in the EU. You have been identified as a well-respected legal practitioner who has knowledge and experience of the use of expert evidence and those who provide it in your country’s courts and tribunals.
We would therefore highly appreciate it if you could share your views and insight via the online questionnaire, no later than 24 April 2018.
Once all the results have been gathered and analysed, a specific area “FIND AN EXPERT” will be created on the e-justice website (https://e-justice.europa.eu/home.do?action=home&plang=en&init=true), that will provide a comprehensive directory of practising experts within the Member States across the European Union, as well as detailed information on the civil and criminal expertise procedures for instructing, accrediting and governing experts in the various Member States. It is expected this will go live in mid-2019.
Thank you in advance for your valuable input to this important project. If you have any questions about the project or the questionnaire, please contact one of the persons in charge for your Member State group (see below), who will be very happy to assist you:
- UK, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, Spain; Christine Scott; christine.scott@ewi.org.uk
- France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Romania; Marian Drilea-Marga: drilea.marian@gmail.com
- Greece, Germany, Austria, Italy; Giovanna Ichino: giovanna.ichino@giustizia.it
- Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherland; Nico Keijser: n.keijser@experts-institute.eu
- Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary; Jacques Honkoop: jacques.honkoop@syntheseconsultancy.nl
- Slovakia, Portugal, Croatia, Czech Republic; Sergey Zakharov: asn@seznam.cz
- Sweden, Finland, Denmark; Benoît de Clerck: b.declerck@experts-institute.eu
This team is at the disposal of the people receiving the questionnaire to help and guide them and answer all their questions. Exchanges are made by email, conference calls, possibly meeting on site to help answer the questionnaire and then to answer any follow-up questions that may aris.
Thank you for participating and answering the questionnaire until 16 April 2018.
Information note on EEEI
Created in 2006, the European Expertise and Experts Institute (EEEI) has adopted the objective of contributing, through its work, to the convergence of national judicial practices and systems of expertise and of helping to guarantee, throughout the European judicial area, the legal certainty of judicial decisions through the quality of expertise performed on the basis of a judicial appointment.
The EEEI brings together representatives of High Courts (Courts of Appeal or equivalent), Bars, companies of experts and academics from each of the Member States of the European Union concerned by these issues. The EEEI is a think tank at the European level as well as a platform for interdisciplinary and cross-border exchange. It is independent from any public or private authority, and its work contributes to the emergence of common consensual solutions that can be transposed into the various systems of European law on the long term.
For more than 4 years, EEEI has been an observer at the CEPEJ - Council of Europe. In that position, it has been involved in the work on civil and criminal judicial expertise and contributed to the elaboration of the guidelines on judicial expertise, adopted in December 2014 and published in January 2015.
In 2010-2012, the EEEI carried out an inventory of procedures relating to expertise in civil matters and of works on judicial expertise. This project, which was co-funded by the European Commission and was called EUREXPERTISE, ended with an international colloquium organised in Brussels on 16 and 17 March 2012 on the theme "The future of civil judicial expertise in the European Union".
In 2014, EEEI launched a new project co-funded by the European Commission to develop a guide to good practice for civil judicial expertise in Europe as part of a project entitled EGLE - European Guide for Legal Expertise.
On this occasion, the EEEI implemented a method called a consensus conference, based on the skills and cooperation of professionals from the Member States and the exchange of experiences.
The results of the work of Working Groups composed of members from many countries of the European Union were discussed at a plenary conference on 29 May 2015 in the Grand Hall of the Italian Court of Cassation in Rome. Magistrates, Lawyers, Experts, Academics, representatives of Supreme Courts, European or world institutions: altogether, 160 people representing 22 countries took part in these works.
A Jury of eminent European personalities, based on the debates of the plenary conference and the preparatory work, then met regularly to draw up this Guide to Good Practice, which was disseminated in more than 15,000 copies.
To date, the Guide has been translated into 8 languages and distributed in 50,000 copies. It is also published by Bruylant.
More information can be found on the website of the EEEI (https://experts-institute.eu/en).
EEEI
38, rue de Villiers, 92532 Levallois-Perret Cedex -France, Tel : +33(0)141490760, Fax : +33 (0)141490289, E-mail: contact@experts-institute.eu
