Strasbourg, 3 March 2017

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2017)1

English only

European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ)

Working Group on evaluation of judicial systems

(CEPEJ-GT-EVAL)

Peer review on judicial statistics

 9th cycle (2017)

Visit report:

Prague (Czech Republic), 6 – 7 February 2017 (n°18)

 

General introduction

1.             The exercise of evaluating judicial systems, carried out by the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), has the aim of progressively defining a set of core quantitative and qualitative key elements, with data collected on a regular basis and examined consistently across all member States of the Council of Europe. By focusing on these common indicators to assess the quality and efficiency of the functioning of justice within the member States of the Council of Europe, CEPEJ is able to analyse and present a unique picture of the organisation of justice in Europe.

2.             This regular evaluation exercise is facilitated by meticulous and rigorously tested processes, which have been agreed with all 47 members of the CEPEJ, who have helped frame the evaluation scheme, and which has now become permanent. The CEPEJ framework is supported by a system of national correspondents, enabling efficient communication with the secretariat of the CEPEJ on guidelines on collection and analysis of statistical data.

3.             As part of a programme of work to develop  its evaluation methodology, CEPEJ decided, at its 10th plenary meeting (Strasbourg, 5-6 December 2012), to set up a peer review co-operation process, with a primary aim of strengthening the credibility of the data collected and used to evaluate the efficiency of the  European judicial systems[1]. This peer review co-operation process was planned to include three peer review visits every year, with states volunteering to host a peer visit.  

Year

Cycle

Countries visited

2008

Pilot cycle

France, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Poland

2009

First

Malta and the Russian Federation

2010

Second

Meeting in Oslo with 5 Nordic States (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden)

2011

Third

Turkey, the Netherlands and Austria

2012

Fourth

Azerbaijan

2013

Fifth

Latvia

2014

Sixth

Estonia, Switzerland plus ad hoc mission in Israel

2015

Seventh

Lithuania and Slovakia

2016

Eighth

Serbia

4.             The reports of the peer visits can be consulted in the following documents:

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2008)1 (1st cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2010)5 (2nd cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2011)2Rev3 (3rd cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2012)8(4th cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2013)9Rev (5th cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2014)2 (6th cycle),

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2015)8 and CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2015)23 (7th cycle) and

CEPEJ-GT-EVAL(2016)5 (8th cycle)

5.             Peers are members or observers of the Working Group on Evaluation of the CEPEJ (CEPEJ-GT-EVAL), who have the task to prepare, every two years, the report on evaluation of the European judicial systems. As a rule, the peers’ visits are organised by the CEPEJ member and the national correspondent responsible for the collection of CEPEJ data. As a way of facilitating co-operation, establishing best practice and promoting exchanges, the host CEPEJ member may be asked to assist the peers in another visit within the same evaluation cycle. In this way visited country becomes peer for next peer reviews.

6.             The main objectives of this co-operation are as follows :

§  Supporting Council of Europe member States in:

-         improving the quality of their judicial statistics,

-         developing their statistics system so that judicial statistics, at national level, are in line with the key indicators defined through the CEPEJ's Evaluation Scheme.

§  Facilitating the exchange of experiences between national judicial statistics systems, sharing good practices, identifying benchmarks and facilitating the transfer of information.

§  Contributing to the transparency and accountability of the CEPEJ process for evaluating European judicial systems and helping to improve the process.


EVALUATION MISSION No.18 (Prague, Czech Republic)

Presentation

Date: 6 – 7 February 2017

Organiser: Ministry of Justice, Czech Republic

Participants:

For Czech Republic:

Ministry of Justice

·         Robert Pelikán, Minister of Justice

·         Klára Cetlová, Deputy Minister of Justice

·         Ivana Borzová, Department of Judicial Supervision, CEPEJ member, national correspondent

·         Petr Navrátil, Legislative Section

·         Kateřina Majkútová, Legislative Section

·         David Pánek, Judicial and Statistical Department

·         Václav Jonáš, Judicial and Statistical Department

·         Marek Plaštiak, IT Department

·         Ondřej Ezr, IT Department

·         Josef Hajšman, IT Department

Office of the Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights

·         Eva Petrová

Supreme Court of the Czech Republic

·         Aleš Pavel

Municipal Court in Prague

·         Simona Bradáčová, vice-president of the Municipal Court in Prague

·         Sylvie Baranová, Register Unit

District Court of Prague 1

·         Alena Novotná, vice-president of District Court of Prague 1 (pilot court)

Czech Bar Assotiation

Martin Vychopeň, President of the Bar Association

Antonin Mokry, Vice president of the Bar Association

Vice president

Lenka Vojířová, Czech Bar Association

For CEPEJ:

-            Georg Stawa (President of CEPEJ)

-            Ladislav Dudits - CEPEJ member and National Correspondent/Slovakia

-            Laetitia Brunin - CEPEJ member/France

-            Christel Schurrer- Secretary of GT-EVAL

-            Lidija Naumovska - Statistician


Programme:

Tuesday 7 February, 2017


Meetings at the Ministry of Justice

10.00 - 10.30

Welcome speech - Robert Pelikán

Introductory remarks by the CEPEJ experts

10.30 - 10.45

Short overview of the Czech judicial system, organization of the court system, role of the Ministry of Justice - Ivana Borzová

10.45 - 11.00

Role and competences of the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic - Aleš Pavel

11.00 - 11.30

Presentation on civil procedure and recent and prepared legislative reforms - presentation of the legislative department - Kateřina Majkútová,                       Petr Navrátil  

11.30 - 11.45

Coffee break

11.45 - 12.15

Courts’ information system - overview, current state, information systems focus on CSLAV (history, features) - presentation of the IT Department - part I. - Marek Plaštiak

12.15 - 12.45

Collecting of courts’ statistics, statistical reports (incoming, resolved and pending cases) - presentation of the Department of statistics and analysis - part I. -  David Pánek, Václav Jonáš 

12.45 - 13.30

Lunch

14.00 - 16.00

On-field visit to the Municipal court in Prague

Hosted by: Simona Bradáčová, vice-president of the Municipal Court in Prague

Wednesday 8 February, 2017


Meetings at the Ministry of Justice

9.00 - 9.15

Presentation of the Office of the Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights - Database of the case-law of ECHR - Eva Petrová

9.15 - 9.45

Presentation of the Department of statistics and analysis - part II. - statistical lists (more detailed information, calculation methods of length of proceedings) - David Pánek, Václav Jonáš

9.45 - 10.15

Presentation of the IT Department - part II. - advanced analytics justice - Marek Plaštiak  

10.15 - 10.45

- discussion with persons involved in the collection of data requested by the CEPEJ and difficulties: practical experience with the data collection and filling in the CEPEJ scheme for evaluation of judicial systems/concluding remarks

11.00 - 12.00

On-field visit to the District Court of Prague 1 (including lunch)

Hosted by: Alena Novotná, vice-president of the District Court of Prague 1 

12.30 - 14.00

Visit of the Czech Bar Association Hosted by:

Martin Vychopeň, president of the Czech Bar Association 

Antonín Mokrý, vice-president of the Czech Bar Association, vice-president of the CCBE

Lenka Vojířová, Department of international relationship


Peer Visit Report

Before the mission, an analysis of the statistical data for Czech Republic was done to provide the expert team an overview of the Czech Republic justice system, helping them to understand the situation and enable them good input to facilitate the discussion with Czech authorities. This pre-mission report is attached as Annex 1 to this mission report.

1.             Welcome meeting

The delegation was welcomed by the Minister of Justice of the Czech Republic Mr Robert Pelikán, who was well aware of the work of CEPEJ and the CoE in respect of evaluation of the judicial systems of the member states.   He underlined the importance of understanding where the position of the justice system of the Czech Republic is in international context. He also emphasized the importance not only to review the available numbers but also to do in depth analysis of the concepts and methods used.

The Minister informed the delegation that the Czech Republic is just starting a big change in the ICT system that will integrate the case management and statistical analysis system of the whole Czech judiciary. At this point of time he considers very important to focus on the questions what data to collect and for which purpose. The objective of the new system is to modernise further the existing system and enable easy access to good quality of data that allows complex statistical analysis. In this way evaluation of real performance of the judiciary will be possible.

The Minister took part of the whole morning session of the discussion which enabled the delegation full access to information presented both from the aspect of the direct participants in the process of judicial data collection and organisation as well as from policy perspective.

The President of CEPEJ Mr George Stawa, expressed his gratitude for the invitation for the peer review and organisation of the mission. Furthermore Mr Stawa explained the objectives of a peer review process as an activity that serves to exchange good practices with the beneficiary country.

He also presented the Peer review team and gave short information about the latest products of CEPEJ last evaluation cycle. The Minister was also presented with the latest reports as well as the CEPEJ STAT database that he was already been familiar with. 

2.     Short overview of the Czech judicial system, organization of the court system and the role of the Ministry of Justice

The welcome speech was followed by a series of presentations in the Ministry of Justice

Ms Ivana Borzová, a CEPEJ Bureau member, CEPEJ Member and National Correspondent for the Czech Republic introduced all participants of the Czech side and gave a short overview of the Czech judicial system, organization of the court system and the role of the Ministry of Justice

Ministry of justice of the Czech Republic is the highest state administration authority for:

·         courts

·         public prosecutors

·         prison service

·         Probation and Mediation Service

The Czech judicial map is stable and can be presented with the graph below. 

Diagram of Courts in the Republic of Czech Republic

It is a four layer system where the Regional courts also act as a first instance courts for some type of cases while the High courts as second instance for these cases.  It is also worth underlying that courts are managed by court presidents that are also acting as judges in their courts. 

The role of the MoJ connected with the work of courts concerns:

         i.        Organizational and personnel issues 

        ii.        Economic and financial matters and

       iii.        Efficiency of court proceedings

In respect of organizational and personnel issues the responsibility of the MoJ includes: 

-          Annual determination of the number of judges, judicial trainees, assistants and other judicial personnel for each court depending on the number of incoming cases;

-          organizes examinations for judicial candidates and

-          organizes and manages the activity of sworn court experts and interpreters.

The Minister of justice pointed out that in principle the MoJ cannot do too many changes in respect of situation of judges. The number of judges as well as their salary is fixed in the law and the ministry can only act upon the newly appointed judges that are replacing emptied posts.  In fact, the Ministry can only decide on the new-coming judges while the existing can be transferred only upon their consent.

The annual turnover is around 100 judges while the total number of 3063 judges remains stable.  It should be noted that president of the courts in Czech Republic also act as judges in the relevant court.

Since the number of incoming cases is not necessarily the only important indicator for a workload in a court the MoJ is also looking at the backlog as well as the performance of court (both for judges and staff members) in order to improve the efficiency of specific court. When analysing the efficiency of certain courts Ministry does not only look at the main statistical indicators like the median and the means but also the division of courts in deciles to analyse at the top and bottom cluster.

The Minister also declared that for the moment the finances dedicated to the judiciary seemed sufficient and there is no plan to significantly change the situation in that respect. No complaints are received from judges since their financial remuneration fixed in the law seems to be sufficient.

In respect of economic and financial matters the responsibility is to:

-          secure funding and money management of individual courts;

-          control economic activities of the courts and

-          determine the means of public expenditure for regional courts.

Court proceedings:

-          pursues and evaluates court proceedings only in terms of unreasonable delays, the principles of judicial ethics and dignity of proceedings. In that respect the MoJ is entitled to:

o    pursue and evaluate the situation in the court work on the basis of judicial statistics;

o    check court files;

o    deal with complaints against courts procedure.  

In order to follow the most critical cases the Ministry has a file where every court needs to include each case older than 5 years including the reasons for the delay.

The CEPEJ delegation was interested to learn if these cases are included in the statistics presented for the CEPEJ evaluation and if the number of these cases is significant to influence in high extend the Disposition time.

Ms Borzová explained that the issue is mostly relevant for the courts in North Bohemia that is struggling with the backlog. These courtst as explained has low number of staff and high migration. Ms Borzová pointed out that situation is different depending on a region.

The Minister explained that no organisational change is planned for the moment and they are only working on improving the efficiency of courts. For that reason a new ICT project is planned to be implemented in the next two years. The total value of the project is 200 M Czech Krona, funds secured from the European funds.

3.     Role and competences of the Supreme Court of the Czech Republic

The responsibilities of the Supreme court were presented by Aleš Pavel . The Supreme Court is the highest instance judicial institution in Czech Republic. It has 68 judges in total where 22 are dedicated to criminal cases and the remaining 46 in civil cases.  The present average length of proceedings on this instance is calculated to 192 days for civil cases and 42 for the criminal. It was pointed out that the Insolvency cases in average last longer and up to two years.

The specific for the Czech Supreme court is that extraordinary appeal is also possible to be carried out by this court when they rule on the proceeding.

Additionally the Supreme Court works on decision notion to unify decisions taken on lower instance courts. In that case this court provides legal opinion taken by a Grand Chamber of 9 judges. There are 13 judges in total that are part of the Grand Chamber.

In other proceedings there is a Panel of 3 judges for each decision.

The Supreme Court is reviewing its work by analysing the statistical reports that are prepared monthly and annually by the Ministry of Justice.

The statistics show a continuous increase of incoming cases for 5-10% every year and based on that the Ministry has granted them one more judge in 2017 but also 70 other non-judge personnel including rechtspleger.

The Minister stressed out that even though the increase in the number of incoming cases is evident the number of cases processed by the Supreme Court does not include all these cases since depending on a year 70-77% of these cases are refused as inadmissible.

 

The representative of the Supreme Court confirmed the situation for judges at the Supreme court is satisfactory while there could be improvement on the side of non-judge staff. While the situation might be considered acceptable for judge assistants since they are in preparation to become a judge one day other professionals that are expected to produce high quality legal or other research should respectively be remunerated for their duties.

4.             Civil procedure legislation changes

Mr Petr Navrátil  from the Legislative Department presented the situation and the expected changes in the civil procedure legislation. The reason for the changes was explained with the fact that the basic legislation dates from 1963, lacks conception and was adequate for the previous regime. Since then over 150 legislative amendments were added which according to Mr Navrátil resulted in legislation that is complicated, disorganized and formalistic.

The new Civil Procedure Code is under preparation. In 2014 new Civil Code entered into force and MoJ established a Recodification Commission composed of a large number of experts. Since the large Commission was not very effective in 2016 a smaller working group was established in order to prepare the concept of new Civil Procedure Code. The new Civil Procedure Code shall be inspired by regionally and socio-economically close codes (especially Austrian Civil Procedure Code)

The guiding principles are: securing the right to the fair trial and efficiency and effectiveness of the civil proceedings.

One change that will be applied is automated generator of assigning cases to judges as in Slovakia that is to replace the present work schedules (i.e. cases are assigned to judges based on rotation system).  The goal of the Ministry of Justice is to create a technical tool which would exclude human influence in the assignment of cases.

Additionally in respect of court fees the intention is to make some changes in order to discourage applicants from filing trivial, ill-founded or bullying lawsuits; encourage out of court settlement; lower fees in relevant cases (e.g. discrimination cases). The Ministry of Justice also wants to simplify court proceedings in case the court fee is not to be paid and also try to reduce the current excessive number of cases per year at the Supreme Court         

And finally Mr Navrátil   presented some planned changes to the Insolvency act from 2006.

The president of CEPEJ Mr Stawa warned that in Austria (which is taken as an example of good practice by the Czech authorities) there are discussions of necessary changes that should contribute to the modernisation of the existing civil procedure Code and they should reflect the pace of the modern society. The justice should go hand in hand with the society. He pointed out that in present world a company cannot wait for six months and receive a decision after bankruptcy. 

Ms Kateřina Majkútová from the same department presented the recent changes or legislation under preparation.

In respect of conflict of interest new amendments to the law are done; judges and prosecutors status changed to public officials; new central registry on property and income of public officials was established; limitation for public officials to possess media or corporations were introduced; and other smaller changes.

In order to improve the quality of expert opinions and to restore public trust in expert examination new law on court experts and interpreters was approved by the Government and entered in Parliament procedure. The significant changes include: new entry conditions including exam; electronic register of expert opinions; new law of offenses; higher remuneration; methodological recommendations; greater control of performance of experts.

Important changes are planned also in legal aid. Government already approved the outline of a future law. The major changes will include:

-          Legal aid will continue to be provided by lawyers (attorneys) through Ministry of Justice and Czech Bar Association but more responsibility will be transferred to the Czech Bar Association.

-          Legal aid will be paid from the state budget. At this point only the court appointed lawyers (ex-officio) are paid by the state while the legal aid provided by the Czech Bar association is covered by lawyers members of the Bar or the Bar itself.

-          Applicants will have to prove that they do not have enough money and that they are in need of legal aid. At this point they only give a declaration that they cannot find and afford a lawyer.  

-          Limitation of hours per year for one applicant will be introduced to avoid overuse.

-          Introducing some other options how to be provided legal aid free of charge.

As for execution the MoJ is in phase of preparation of amendment that will include: obligation to pay advances; require „Protected account“ (frozen); simplification and removal of overlap or contradictions with civil procedure code.

5.     Presentation by ICT department part I and II

This presentation was made by Mr Marek Plaštiak who presented current environment with the ICT environment with an accent on the analytical part of the system where statistical analysis is carried out.

Initially the role of the ICT Department of the MoJ was presented. Their role covers the whole judicial system of the country including all courts and includes:

-          Daily maintenance of hardware and software;

-          Information system management including problems solving; user change requests and regular meetings with implementation teams;

-          ICT development that includes setting up strategy; implementing projects and ensuring compliance with agreed strategies and policies;

-          Finally ensuring ICT security.

The objective for direction of development of ICT is set up in 2015 and the final goal is to have fully implemented e-justice in 2020.

ICT structure with an accent to the data warehouse and the data analysis can be presented with this simplified chart.

The application in focus is CSLAV (Central statistical sheets and reports) that is a source of the statistical sheets and reports. This application was created in 2008 and it seems that it has already overgrown the needs and it is planned to replace it with AAJ (Advanced Analytic Justice). Both CSLAV and future AAJ as input are using or going to use the Data Warehouse. Data Warehouse is fully anonymised to avoid individual data recognition protected by law.

Development timeline that leads to AAJ is the following:

-          2002 – SLAV (excel sheets collected from subjects of justice)

-          2004 – CSLAV proof of concept– data warehouse creation (centralization)

-          2007 – ORA BI implementation (insolvency)

-          2008 – Data warehouse implementation and data migration

-          2015 – End of active development of CSLAV (approval of eJustice 2020)

-          2017 – First AAJ implementation

Main limitations with CSLAV:

-          Dependency of supplier for smallest change

-          Ownership of source code

-          Insufficient documentation

-          Only fixed number of pre-defined reports; No flexibility in data analysis, no charts, no graphs, no descriptive statistics.

-          No further development possible.

The expectations and plans related with the future AAJ (Advanced Analytical Justice) are high and the objective is to gain higher flexibility and to expand options in terms of data analysis and report generation. The future system will try to keep the strengths of the existing CSLAV while including all the new features to fulfil the defined objectives. The features to keep are already identified and include:

-          Data publishing process (infoData)

-          Internal controls

-          Access rights

Main challenges in the new system are identified as:

-          Defining rules for change management of the data warehouse

-          Cooperation with users in terms of design & development

-          Building user-friendly interface accessing DW adequate for different level users

-          System documentation

At this point of time the contract with the provider is in process of signature and the ICT Department team is confident to see the first results already in six months.

Mr Ondřej Ezr from the ICT team also presented Saiku as an open source commercial product as feel like system for the future AAJ.

6.     Presentation of the Department of statistics and analysis - part I and part II.

The two presentations of the availability of statistics were made by Mr David Pánek and Mr Václav Jonáš from the Statistics and analytics department of the MoJ. One presentation was organised first day and the second following. In the first presentation the two main categories of reports available in CSLAV were described:

-          Statistical Reports that include data on courts activity as:

o    number of incoming cases,

o    progress of their resolution and the number of pending cases and backlog,

o    types of the case resolution (judgement, court order, agreement on guilt and punishment, stay of proceedings , settlement etc.),

o    other data.

and

-          Statistical sheets – data on finalised cases that includes cases for which the judgement becomes enforceable.

These reports are used both within the judicial system as well as well as outside. As for internal use the reports are used to:

-          assess the need for judges and non-judge staff,

-          assess efficiency of courts (number of cases in comparison with number of judges, rechtspflegers, judicial assistants),

-          evolution of time series (incoming cases, resolved cases, pending cases),

-          backlog by the time the case is not resolved (following number of overdue cases)

In this system, all predefined reports are generated automatically from the data warehouse and can be produced for: each court; for different time period; for all different type of cases (criminal cases; civil cases; cases of the upbringing and caretaking of a minor; cases related to the Public Registers; insolvency cases and incidence disputes and administrative cases). Same data can also be generated by senate in each court; judge, rechsfleger and judicial assistant.

All generated reports can be downloaded in three formats (Excel, PDF, HTML)

These reports are also used as a tool for logical and mathematical control of the entry data since certain visible errors in the presented report reflect some mistakes in the data registration process.

Basic logical control of each report is: „Pending at the end of the previous period + Reopened + newly filed = Resolved + Pending at the end of the period“.

The reports generated with CSLAV are then imported in STATA and analysed further.

During the presentation on statistical sheets the difference from statistical reports was emphasized. These lists are filled by first instance courts (district and regional courts), sent in an electronic form and automatically stored in the data storage. These records are filled out only after the judgement becomes enforceable. There is one statistical list and consequently one record in the data storage for each case.

The records are categorized only by most important categories: criminal cases; civil cases; cases of the upbringing and caretaking of a minors (district courts only), administrative cases (regional courts only) and insolvencies (regional courts only). Detailed information about cases is available as for example:

-          court ID,

-          matter in dispute or section of the Criminal Code,

-          important case-related dates (date of case filing, date of case resolution etc.),

-          result of the proceedings,

-          data on appeal (filed yes/no, who filed an appeal etc.),

-          data on plaintiff and defendant,

-          types and amount of sanctions imposed,

-          etc.

Ministry of justice have access to the database that contains data from statistical sheets. Data is then exported from data storage in .csv format to be imported in Stata, thus further working with data is possible

There are several hundreds of thousands of lines and tens of columns per year.

In this way all outputs can be defined as needed. Extensive number of statistical and analytical functions is then implemented within Stata including creating graphical outputs

In this way any level of aggregation, comparison and statistical analysis is possible for the statistical department.

A few examples are displayed in the following slides

7.     Court visits - Municipal court in Prague and District Court of Prague 1

The onsite visit to the Municipal court in Prague was hosted by: Ms Simona Bradáčová a vice-president of this court responsible for insolvency cases.

The visit started with a meeting with Ms Bradáčová followed by onsite tour to the Registry Unit.

This court has a branch for civil and criminal cases and also one for insolvency cases. This is a biggest court with 17 chambers (panels) and average of 11 cases per chamber per month. Each judge has two judicial assistants. 

It has to be pointed out that there is a special application for insolvency cases including insolvency register. This application enables fully electronic case filing and majority of cases are dealt in electronic way.  Also the application can transfer the case to second instance when relevant.

The insolvency registry is also part of this court. When a physical person or company is declaring insolvency the file is registered in the registry unit and it is available for editing for the next 15 minutes only to correct eventual mistakes. After this period the information about declaration of insolvency is final and made public after 3 hours. The publicly available register includes only partial information of the register on insolvency. A unique identification number of person or company is used in the system to identify the entity. Since the system is centralised one person/or company cannot register more than once.

The delegation was presented how an insolvency case is registered.

The onsite visit to the District court of Prague 1 was hosted by: Alena Novotná, vice-president of this court responsible for commercial cases.

The visit to this court was shorter than planed and the discussion was organised with Ms Novotná only. This court is located in centre of Prague were there are more commercial entities rather than individuals and for that reason there is for example only one judge that is working on family cases.    

8.     Presentation of the Office of the Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights

The second day meeting at the Ministry of Justice started with a presentation of the Office of the Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights - Database of the case-law of ECHR made by Eva Petrová.

The mandate of the Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights is to litigate on behalf of the Czech Republic in the proceedings before the ECHR and implement judgments against the Czech Republic at the national level. Other activities of this body are: comment draft legislation, develop national database of the ECHR’s case-law in Czech language, publishing quarterly newsletter on relevant ECHR decisions etc.

The newsletter is publically available on the MoJ website but also electronically distributed to judges that request it. It is prepared on quarterly basis and summaries of all judgments and decision against the Czech Rep but also summaries significant judgments against other states. The Newsletter is prepared in cooperation with the Constitutional, Supreme and Supreme Administrative Court and the Office of the Ombudsperson.

This office also informs judges on ECHR decisions in case this judge is directly involved in the case submitted to ECHR.

The national database is created in 2015 and it is regularly updated and freely available in Czech language at: http://eslp.justice.cz It includes:

-          Full translations and summaries of all decisions and judgments in cases against the Czech Republic;

-          Summaries of significant judgments and decisions of the Court against other Member States since 2012

It is interesting to note that search in this database is based on key words linked with Czech national law as well as European convention of human rights.

To easy utilisation a guide to the database as well as a video is available. The delegation was presented very amusing video specially enhanced with subtitles in English for the purpose of the visit.

9.     Discussion with persons involved in the collection of data requested by the CEPEJ

After the presentation of the Analytical and Statistical department, CEPEJ team opened discussion to clarify availability and conceptual differences for some data. Following clarifications were made:

Conceptual differences:

Issue: During the two last data CEPEJ collection it was identified that in Czech Republic it is difficult to distinguish when a case is finalised for the specific instance. Namely as specified in the comment on Q 91 for the number of first instance cases: “For all evaluation cycles for the Czech Republic it was not possible to identify the number of pending cases solely on 1st instance since, each case is considered pending until the moment a final decision (in final instance) is enacted and no further proceeding is possible.”

Clarification: Czech side clarified that the comment is not valid anymore since the data on pending cases is adjusted to include only pending cases on the specific instance and it is satisfying CEPEJ definition. CEPEJ will edit the comments and propose changes to the Czech National Correspondent for confirmation.

Issue: In 2010, 2012 and 2013 business register cases, administrative cases and insolvency registry cases that are of first instance but decided in regional courts of second instance were included in second instance. This is solved since 2014 cycle but the number of judges is not presented following the same method. Furthermore the Czech Republic has a four-tier system. The number of judges of the two High Courts is included in the number of second instance judges. This methodology of presentation of data is applied since 2013, while for the previous evaluations, magistrates of the High Courts were considered as third instance judges.

Clarification: Considering that in Czech Republic some courts are at the same time courts of two instances still a fact that judges work solely on one instance. In the next evaluation cycle an effort will be made to present correctly data on number of judges per instances following same methodology as it is already done for the number of cases per instances.

Availability:

 Issue: Q100 on the sub categories of number criminal cases on highest instance do not exist and only total is available. CEPEJ team was wondering why this is a case when this data for other two instances is available. Question was posed if misdemeanour cases can go up to third instance.  

Clarification: The representative from the Supreme court was not present the second day and the representatives from the MoJ pointed that Supreme court does not make this distinction since it rules on law issues and not on fact issues related to a case.

Issue: - Q101 special category of cases presented in this question like: employment dismissal; robbery and intentional homicide are not available. Also almost all categories in Q102 for data on average duration of cases per instance and backlog is not available.

Clarification: For Q101, since the application for insolvency cases is different data for this question is answered from this source and not from CSLAV. For the other categories CSLAV only has the data on divorces available in the pre-defined reports. Other CEPEJ requested types are not included in CSLAV. For Q102 the new system should be able to answer more precisely.

Issue:   Q132 salaries of judges and prosecutors (NET salary is NA)

Clarification: Czech counterpart confirmed that net salaries are not available. During next evaluation cycle an effort could be made to present or estimate the net salaries considering that gross salaries are available. If still not possible a comment could be added on the reasons why the net salary is not available.

Issue: - Q20 Number of legal aid cases

Clarification: This information seems not to be available at the courts even though courts are responsible for decision if the person will be appointed a lawyer free of charge (ex-officio) and for his/her nomination. MoJ was hoping that this information might be available at the Czech Bar Association. See clarification in point 11 below.

Issue:   Q167 Number of judicial mediation cases

Clarification: The Law on judicial mediation in non-criminal cases is relatively new since 2012. The judge in some cases has to ask for out of the court mediation. This information might be included in the court records but the total number of cases cannot be derived still. Further investigation is needed.

10.  Visit of the Czech Bar Association

The visit to the Bar assotiation was hosted by: Martin Vychopeň, president of the Czech Bar Association and Antonín Mokrý, vice-president of the Czech Bar Association, vice-president of the CCBE. Ms Lenka Vojířová, from the Department of international relationship organised the meeting.

Czech Bar association organises 1200 lawyers. It is relatively large association. The questions discussed concerned the present and future situation with Legal aid as well as mediation.

In respect of Legal aid the CEPEJ team confirmed the following facts:

-          Every lawyer in Czech Republic must provide Legal Aid when requested by the courts. However this activity is not specially organised.   The lawyer is contacted directly by the court and it is paid by the court. The value of this work of lawyers is paid by the state and the fees are in the range of 70-80% of the normal pre-defined tariff of the lawyers. This is considered acceptable and the lawyers do not have a problem to accept this work. The difficulty is only that those clients are usually more difficult than a standard when the client directly contracts his defending lawyer. No administration on the number of Legal aid cases appointed in this way is available in the Bar.

-          Additional legal assistance is provided by the Bar association directly that is not paid by the state. CEPEJ was informed that around 200 people use this free help on a monthly basis.

-          And finally the Bar association has distributed offices where legal advice can be requested free of charge. This assistance is not counted.

-         

For the people who receive legal aid via the Bar Association no check is done on their financial background to their eligibility of free legal aid. It is implied that this administration is costly to justify the free assistance provided.

 

The Czech Bar association is in agreement with the new changes proposed with the new law on legal aid proposed by the Government that is now in first reading in the Parliament.

The changes are going in direction of transferring the responsibility on providing legal aid more towards the Bar association. The administration of this service was not presented in details.

11.  Conclusions

The mission assisted to clarify the following issues and define the steps as described in point 9.


Annex 1: Pre mission data review for Czech Republic

Before the mission, an analysis of the statistical data for Czech Republic was done; this gave the expert team an overview of the Czech Republic justice system, helping them to understand the situation and enable them good input to facilitate the discussion with Czech authorities.

Following inputs were prepared and made available by Secretariat:

1.     Brief analysis on main indicators (this document)

2.     Complete set of data for the last cycles to analyse some categories of NA

3.     Country fiche

4.     Summary of comments for Czech Republic

5.     Filled questionnaires for 2014 and 2015( EC scoreboard)

In this chapter data from Czech Republic was analysed alone looking at the evolution of different indicators but also compared with 4 other countries that have similar background, similar size or similar GDP. We decided to preselect following countries: Slovakia due to similar background but also similar wealth; Austria as a neighbouring country with similar size; Hungary similar size and wealth and finally Sweden as similar size but richer country.

As the graph below shows, the clearance rate and disposition time in the first instance court varies through years.  Some categories are also not available: administrative for 2010 and 2012 as well as criminal for 2012.

For 2014 data, the clearance rate showed a significant increase only for civil and commercial litigious cases while the administrative and criminal is decreasing. As a result of this the Disposition time for administrative cases is increased significantly and it is now on 415 days which is one third more than the situation in 2008.

  


Compared with other countries the situation is following:

 


Comparison with other countries on Disposition Time is more interesting and shows following:

Number of legal professionals

The number of different legal professionals per 100 000 inhabitants was analysed trough years but also compared with the numbers of some neighbouring and/or similar countries to have the first impression of the Czech Republic resources in comparison with European median.

In Czech Republic situation for different legal professionals since 2010 did not change much except for lawyers.  , The situation is similar with Slovakia and Hungary and much higher than Austria and Sweden. One has to have in mind that Czech Republic also has non-professional judges as well as a number of Rechtsfleger.

Budgetary data

The evolution of the funds granted to the judicial system per capita and its categories for Czech Republic was also viewed.

    

All budget categories seem quite stable over years and no additional investment seems visible.

Comparing with the selected countries it seems that Czech Republic is exactly in the middle of Europe together with Slovenia and Hungary. Austria and Sweden seems to have much higher budges per inhabitant and comparable to their GDP.

As for the evaluation of IT in the justice sector Czech Republic is one of the best countries in Europe. The chart below is from the latest 2015 analysis for the EC scoreboard.

The tables above are created based on the data in the table attached as Annex 1.

Data not available (NA)

There are not much data rated as “ not available” for Czech Republic except for questions that are difficult to answer for many European countries.

·         Q20 Number of legal aid cases

·         Q100 the sub categories of criminal cases on highest instance

·         Q101 for Employment dismissal; robbery and intentional homicide

·         Q102 Almost all categories

·         Q132 salaries of judges and prosecutors (NET salary is NA)

·         Q167 Judicial mediation cases

Conceptual problems with data

There are only 2 problems with the concepts for Czech Republic:

1.         The difficulty to distinguish when a case is finalised for the specific instance (as for Slovakia). Namely as specified in the comment on Q 91 for the number of first instance cases: “For all evaluation cycles for the Czech Republic it was not possible to identify the number of pending cases solely on 1st instance since, each case is considered pending until the moment a final decision (in final instance) is enacted and no further proceeding is possible.The good side of that is that one identification number follows all cases on all instances. It has to be seen why this is not possible to be distinguished considering the high level of computerisation in judicial sphere in Czech Republic.

2.         In 2010, 2012 and 2013 business register cases, administrative cases and insolvency registry cases that are of first instance but decided in regional courts of second instance were included in second instance and after they moved to first instance. This is solved since 2014 cycle but the number of judges is not presented following the same method. Furthermore the Czech Republic has a four-tier system. The number of judges of the two High Courts is included in the number of second instance judges. This methodology of presentation of data is applied since 2013, while for the previous evaluations, magistrates of the High Courts were considered as third instance judges.


Annex 1. Main indicators for Czech Republic

Budget

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

Amount granted for judicial system as a % of GDP (Q1,Q3,Q6,Q12,Q13)

0,30%

0,31%

0,33%

0,31%

0,31%

Amount granted for the court system as a % of GDP (Q3,Q6)

0,23%

0,24%

0,25%

0,22%

0,21%

Amount granted for the legal aid as a % of GDP (Q3,Q2)

0,0188%

0,0158%

0,0147%

0,0133%

0,02%

Amount granted for the  prosecution as a % of GDP (Q3, Q13)

0,06%

0,06%

0,06%

0,06%

0,09%

Amount granted for judicial system per capita

43,58 €

45,64 €

43,80 €

44,70 €

44,70 €

Amount granted for the court system per capita

32,95 €

35,28 €

33,85 €

32,85 €

35,85 €

Amount granted for legal aid per capita

2,70 €

2,30 €

1,98 €

1,94 €

2,00 €

Amount granted for prosecution system per capita

7,93 €

8,06 €

7,98 €

8,10 €

9,20 €

First instance incoming cases per 100 inhab.

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

Total number of other than criminal cases (Q91)

15,11

9,96

16,50

9,11

5,40

Civil (and commercial) litigious cases(Q1,Q91)

4,37

3,45

4,46

4,57

2,26

Administrative law cases (Q1,Q91)

#N/A

#N/A

#N/A

0,09

               0,37  

Total  criminal cases (Q1,Q94)

0,93

#N/A

#N/A

0,96

1,72

First instance resolved cases per 100 inhab.

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

Total number of other than criminal cases (Q91)

14,34

11,33

15,98

8,86

5,71

Civil (and commercial) litigious cases(Q1,Q91)

4,51

3,41

4,03

4,79

2,28

Administrative law cases (Q1,Q91)

#N/A

#N/A

#N/A

0,08

0,37

Total  criminal cases (Q1,Q94)

0,94

#N/A

#N/A

0,96

1,92

Performance indicators

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

CR Total of other then criminal cases (Q91)

94,95%

113,70%

96,84%

97,33%

100,90%

CR Civil (and commercial) litigious cases (Q91)

103,28%

98,84%

90,20%

104,71%

99,90%

CR administrative law cases

#N/A

#N/A

#N/A

90,92%

99,50%

CR Total  criminal cases (Q94)

100,73%

#N/A

#N/A

99,92%

100,10%

DT Total of other then criminal cases (Q91)

              115  

              116  

                     76  

              157  

                134  

DT (1) Civil (and commercial) litigious cases  (Q91)

              128  

              174  

                   187  

              163  

                177  

DT administrative law cases (days)

#N/A

#N/A

#N/A

              415  

                   99  

DT Total  criminal cases (Q94)

                 72  

#N/A

#N/A

                 64  

                111  

Professional

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

Professional judges per 100 000 inhab (Q1, Q46)

           29,12  

           29,07  

                29,06  

           28,77  

             18,05  

Non-judge staff per 100 000 inhab. (Q1,Q52)

           90,31  

           86,92  

                86,64  

           88,45  

55,33

Prosecutors per 100 000 inhabitants (Q1, Q55)

           11,79  

           11,82  

#N/A

           11,71  

10,41

Lawyers per 100 000 inh. (Q1, Q146)

           96,58  

         104,14  

                97,57  

         112,52  

108,30

Gross annual salary of a judge at the beginning of a career in relation with average gross annual salary (Q132/Q4)

             2,13  

             2,13  

#N/A

             2,52  

               2,26  

Gross annual salary of a supreme court judge  in relation with average gross annual salary (Q132/Q4)

             4,77  

             4,35  

#N/A

             5,05  

               4,22  

Gross annual salary of a prosecutor at the beginning of a career in relation with average gross annual salary (Q132/Q4)

             1,72  

             1,91  

#N/A

             2,27  

               1,81  

Gross annual salary of a prosecutor at the end of career  in relation with average gross annual salary (Q132/Q4)

             3,76  

             3,74  

#N/A

             4,35  

               3,38  

Training

2010

2012

2013

2014

European counties' median 2014

Percentage of court budget allocated to training

0,03%

0,12%

0,03%

0,03%

Budget of the training institution (for judges and prosecutors) as a % of court budget

0,41%

0,41%

#VALUE!

0,38%



[1] This process has been initiated by France; the Working Group on evaluation of judicial systems (CEPEJ-GT-EVAL) is entrusted with its implementation and its follow-up.