Call: Action grants to support transnational projects on promoting the quality of the national justice systems

The general objective of the Programme shall be to contribute to the further development of a European area of justice based on mutual recognition and mutual trust, in particular by promoting judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters.

Specific objectives:

• to facilitate and support judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters;
• to support and promote judicial training, including language training on legal terminology, with a view to fostering a common legal and judicial culture;
• to facilitate effective access to justice for all, including to promote and support the rights of victims of crime, while respecting the rights of the defence;
• to support initiatives in the field of drugs policy as regards judicial cooperation and crime prevention aspects closely linked to the general objective of the Programme, in so far as they are not covered by the Internal security fund for financial support for police cooperation, preventing and combating crime, and crisis management or by the Health for Growth Programme;

The specific objectives of the Programme shall be pursued through, in particular:

• enhancing public awareness and knowledge of Union law and policies;
• with a view to ensuring efficient judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters, improving knowledge of Union law, including substantive and procedural law, of judicial cooperation instruments and of the relevant case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and of comparative law;
• supporting the effective, comprehensive and consistent implementation and application of Union instruments in the Member States and the monitoring and evaluation thereof;
• promoting cross-border cooperation, improving mutual knowledge and understanding of the civil and criminal law and the legal and judicial systems of the Member States and enhancing mutual trust
• improving knowledge and understanding of potential obstacles to the smooth functioning of a European area of justice;
• improving the efficiency of judicial systems and their cooperation by means of information and communication technology, including the cross-border interoperability of systems and applications.

The priority of this call for proposals is to provide an analysis of courts' practices, and initiatives taken, aiming at enhancing the quality of the judicial systems in Member States. Proposals should focus on court best practices in Member States to improve the functioning of the judiciary, for example as regards court management, streamlined case handling, in-house coordination, communication with the parties, possibility to follow up on the case file, quality assurances and other methods to make court proceedings effective and user friendly.

Proposals should also promote a better knowledge of best practices in Member States contributing to the effectiveness of national judicial systems and they should have a clear dissemination strategy actively spreading information about the project, its activities and its results.

The project must be transnational and must be submitted by a partnership of eligible organisations. For the purpose of this call, the proposal must be submitted by organisations (applicant and partner(s)) from at least five different eligible countries as referred to under section 4.2.1 of this call. Please note that any associate partners participating in the project are not counted for the purposes of this criterion.

The indicative available budget under this call for proposals is: 1 000 000 €.

The EU grant requested cannot be lower than 150 000 €.

The funding under this call is based on the co-financing principle: the grant cannot constitute more than 80% of overall eligible project costs.

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