The Executive Director of eu-LISA, Krum Garkov, met with EU Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, on 25 October 2021. Their discussions revolved around different aspects and activities aimed at fostering digitalisation in the European Justice domain and the increasing need to implement new digital solutions in order to modernise the judicial systems and improve their efficiency.
Given that Justice is borderless, Europe should aim for easy access to cross-border justice for citizens, businesses and legal practitioners. Digitalisation in the justice domain should however be based on common principles that must be followed both at European and national levels. There is a clear need for a long-term strategic approach regarding the deployment of digital solutions in the Justice domain.
"eu-LISA has a central role to play in the process of digitalising Justice, considering the broad experience of the Agency in the implementation of digital solutions in the realm of Home Affairs. The Agency is already actively engaged with ongoing efforts towards the further digitalisation of the European Justice area. eu-LISA is responsible for the technical maintenance of the ECRIS RI, is currently developing ECRIS-TCN and will also be taking over the maintenance of e-CODEX from mid-2023. These applications and systems are important building blocks that provide for a solid foundation in the context of the digitalisation of criminal justice," emphasised eu-LISA Executive Director Krum Garkov.
As part of eu-LISA's growing role in the justice domain, in 2020 the Agency took over operational management of the ECRIS Reference Implementation (RI), marking the the first milestone in the development of ECRIS-TCN, a new, centralised, hit/ no-hit large-scale IT system to supplement the existing EU criminal records database (ECRIS) on non-EU nationals (TCNs, third-country nationals) convicted in the European Union. Further to that, in June 2021, the Council of the EU approved a general approach on the EU regulation that foresees the long-term operational management of e-CODEX being given to eu-LISA. e-CODEX (e-Justice Communication via Online Data Exchange) offers a digital, decentralised infrastructure for secure communication between national systems, facilitating its users (judicial authorities, legal practitioners and citizens) to send and receive documents, legal forms and evidence.
