Cross-Border Civil Litigation in the EU: What Can We Learn from COVID-19 Emergency National e-Justice Experiences?

Abstract

As COVID-19 second wave spreads around Europe increasingly forcing Member States to deploy restrictive measures aimed at slowing down its diffusion and protect the people’s health and well-being, reflection on the first wave emergency measures and experiences allow to face the current situation better, but also plan for the future. Court based dispute resolution has been one of the areas affected by the pandemic. As in many other sectors, information and communication technologies initiatives have been carried out to allow the systems to keep functioning. ICTs are no news in the justice domain. They have been broadly introduced in the courts to support interactions between court and courts users in the last 30 years. At the same time, remote forms of litigation, especially in relation to the hearings, have still been the exception before the current emergency. In this perspective, the emergency has provided a strong push to support remote justice service provision and to explore possibilities to reconfigure available tools in order to permit remote working and legal communication.While most of the experiences have been carried out at national level, they may provide the ground for rethinking cross-border judicial procedures. Building on this, after describing the current EU cross border judicial services situation, this paper explores EU Member States e-justice COVID19 emergency measures and attempts to stimulate the discussion on their potential for innovation in cross border judicial proceedings.