Next project in sight for the EEEI, EuroExpert and their partners: the Find an Expert 3 proposal is being drafted in response to the “Call for proposals for action grants to support transnational projects in the fields of e-Justice, victims’ rights and procedural rights (JUST-2023-JACC-EJUSTICE)”.
History
The Find an Expert 3 project follows the FIND AN EXPERT and the FIND AN EXPERT 2 projects.
The Find an Expert project has made available precise information put online on the e-justice website for each Member State. This includes the judicial expertise process, both civil and criminal, and the status of judicial experts. This data has been validated by each country and is updated regularly.
The Find an Expert 2 project (March 2022 to February 2024), still in progress, will enable us to reach an additional consensus and proposes:
- criteria for inclusion on “official” registers of judicial experts in the Member States;
- criteria for assessing the competence of experts necessary for the judicial missions entrusted to them;
- criteria and management processes for registering judicial experts in the Member States;
- a nomenclature of areas of expertise commonly adoptable in the European Union MS;
- an IT prototype that represents the first version of a European search tool for judicial experts and specifications for following versions.
Find an Expert 3 objectives
- Develop the IT tool and implement it in the six pilot countries selected: Luxembourg, Belgium, Romania, Poland, Italy, and France.
- Encourage new Member States to adopt this model and make it financially sustainable.
- Update the register periodically and automatically.
- Create a query tool to generate statistics.
Main tasks
- Managing the project and preparing the response to a call for projects for the project’s follow-up.
- Work on gender equality in partnership with the CEPEJ to determine the proportion of female experts on national lists and consider the obstacles to women’s access to expert lists.
- Work with the pilot countries to finalise the work required for acceptance of the IT tool, to act as project management assistant in setting up the IT tool, to set up a process for enriching data with experts and to define the process for implementing the unified nomenclature.
- IT work: development of the IT tool providing the following functionalities: e-justice interface, database and its management interface, simple and advanced queries, enrichment process, statistics.
- Intellectual work: continuing work on the nomenclature, helping Member States to evolve, continuing work on matching the nomenclature with national nomenclatures and considering involving stakeholders in the future of the project.
- Communication: publicising the project, recruiting participants and convincing Member States.
- Organisation of a conference at the end of the project.
The European Find an Expert Search Tool integrated in the E-Justice Webportal will allow to contact the most appropriate experts in order to entrust them with cross-border appointments, and/or assignments requiring additional criteria of competence or independence and /or would be complex.
Findex 3 will also provide an essential reference framework to enable European judicial experts to exchange information digitally with other participants in the European judicial system, such as judges, court registrars and lawyers, and to move towards a platform for digitalised exchanges for cross-border judicial expertise (e-expertise).
The project is ambitious and requires good coordination between the various partners. It could have a positive impact on access to judicial expertise in Europe, by facilitating the search for qualified experts and contributing to gender equality in this field.
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