European judiciary fail to cooperate

A multi-million Euro European Union (EU) project designed to boost cooperation between the EU’s national judicial sectors has failed to promote European judicial cooperation.
A European Commission report into the 2002-6 scheme on "activities to facilitate judicial cooperation in civil matters" says that there has been a "virtual absence of projects providing for the exchange of judges or for information (swapping) initiatives". Branding this "unfortunate", the Commission report noted that nonetheless, the project has spent Euro 9.75 million, with another Euro 3.75 million coming this year. Much of this money has been spent on informing other (lower level) lawyers about new EU legislation and enabling them to meet and exchange views about the topic. Another areas where there has been little enthusiasm has been the co-financing of non-governmental organisations promoting cross-border civil law cooperation in the EU. This had "attracted very few applications for the first two years", said the Commission, with only the Pan-European Organisation of Personal Injury Lawyers and the Commission on European Family Law getting money. All this aside, its report still maintained that the project had "had an auspicious start".