On 2 February 2018, the Commission started a public consultation in order to evaluate the 2011 European judicial training strategy and to design the new European judicial training strategy for 2019-2025.

The consultation is open to all citizens and stakeholders interested in the future of European judicial training strategy. The training involves all practitioners in the area of justice, e.g., judges, prosecutors, court staff, bailiffs or enforcement officers, lawyers, notaries, mediators, legal interpreters and translators, court experts, prison management and staff, and probation officers.

In its 2011 Communication “Building trust in EU-wide justice. A new dimension to European judicial training,” the Commission set ambitious objectives to be reached by 2020, e.g., to ensure that half of all legal practitioners in the EU (approx. 700,000) are trained in EU law (see also eucrim 1/2017, 8-9). Training topics cover not only specific issues of judicial cooperation, but also the Union’s core values (e.g., the rule of law) and human rights law (CFR, ECHR, etc.).

An accompanying roadmap identifies issues where there is room for future improvement. In addition, the roadmap sets out new developments to be targeted by future training, such as ethics, the rule of law, and independence of the judiciary. One priority is the improvement of and support for training on judicial cooperation in criminal matters, in particular counter-terrorism and fighting cybercrime.

The public consultation runned until 26 April 2018. It is designed as an online survey and provides two questionnaires: a general one and a specific one addressed to the main stakeholders (EU-level training providers for justice professionals, EU-level representatives of justice professions, and EU-level associations of justice professionals).