The frontiers of digital justice in Europe

In 2009, the EU approved the first e-Justice Action Plan. As the name suggest, its goal was to combine digital technologies and the justice sector. In fact, digital technologies have proved useful for private parties in drafting documents, improving access to legal information, and facilitating communications, and they also promise to solve access to justice problems in the public sector. The EU considers that access to justice problems become more acute in cross-border situations because of distance, language barriers, differences in legal culture, and difficulties in enforcing legal rights. The goal of the Action Plan, and its subsequent renewals, has been to reduce some of these barriers with technology. The Action Plan is the perfect example of how the EU is trying in several ways to push towards the adoption of technology in the justice sector. It is updating regulations to encourage digital communications, supporting projects that help cross-border institutional communication, and nudging Member States to use more technology. In this chapter, I provide an overview on the work being done for the digitisation of justice, where I highlight some of the benefits it may bring and suggest some improvements.