Recommendations and Best Practices in Cross-Border Judicial Videoconferencing
The use of videoconferencing in cross-border civil and commercial court proceedings has its challenges in the EU, although the use of videoconferencing is supported by a number of regulations such as the Taking of Evidence Recast Regulation, the European Small Claims Procedure Regulation, the European Account Preservation Order Regulation, the Digitalisation of Judicial Cooperation Regulation.
A few weeks ago, the EAPIL blog announced a conference entitled Simplifying Cross-Border Judicial Videoconferencing in Europe, part of the European SimpliVi Project outcomes. The conference brought together legal scholars from Europe and beyond, legal professionals, IT-specialists, European and national policymakers to discuss their own national and international experiences, developments, key aspects and considerations in the use of videoconferencing from a legal, technical, and organisational perspective, as well as thoughts and initiatives to move forward to support the use of videoconferencing in national and cross-border proceedings and the interaction between national system.
Besides the rich discussions that the people attending the conference in person or online could engage in, the SimpliVi project made available a number of documents that provide valuable information from empirical research about the use of videoconferencing in court hearings after the period of COVID-19 pandemic. The research was carried out with judges, court staff, representatives of public authorities, legal practitioners and IT support staff in 14 Member States – Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Brazil, Canada, and Norway. The summary of the empirical findings are available in an Annex to the SimpliVi Analysis and Design Consolidation document available here.
The richness of the field data the SimpliVI project gathered led to the creation of a document that reflects on best practices and recommendations for judicial videoconferencing with a focus on cross-border cases. The considerations made integrate both organisational, legal, and technological perspectives. The document is available for consultation here.
Although, the outcomes of the SimpliVi project do not immediately solve the challenges of videoconferencing in cross-border situations, they provide useful information about national experiences, solutions chosen, considerations that need to be made when establishing such national infrastructures, points of attention, challenges, and elements that can be part of the national or European solutions that can facilitate European interoperability in the future. There is a lot of space to learn from each other, become more aware of the systems available in various countries, understand what they are capable of, and possibly choose to rely on for direct taking of evidence or for participating in the taking of evidence by a requested authority. Information can inspire change, improvement, and better understanding when choosing to adopt videoconferencing functions and integrating such functionalities within e-justice systems.
The last stage of the project that is forthcoming will also provide insights into an e-CODEX Implementation perspective as a means to facilitate communication between participants in a judicial cross-border videoconference setting. This will be made available here.