Connecting EU Jurisdictions: Exploring How to Open Justice Across Member States Through ICT

Abstract

This article explores the concept of open justice in the context of European Union (EU) cross-border litigation and focusing on the e-justice dimension. It does it looking both at the open justice principle coming from the legal tradition and at the new ideas coming from the open government discourse. More in detail, the article investigates the attempt to create an open area of justice in Europe through the development and implementation of an European Justice Digital Service Infrastructure and the opening of such infrastructure to users and service providers. It is a development and implementation effort, which builds on the EU’s multilevel legal frameworks, which uses available technological innovations, which responds to the economic needs and challenges of an EU without internal borders, and which result should be capable of being embedded in the existing cultural communities. EU Member States (MSs) have developed such infrastructure and tested it successfully. Currently, EU institutions are faced with the serious and unavoidable challenge to open up such infrastructure and to ensure its use. In a dynamic environment in which EU and MSs laws, technologies, economies, and cultures coevolve, this is not an easy task.