When dealing with the issue of the electronization of court proceedings, it is impossible to ignore the e-Justice portal, which few of us have probably heard of, and an even smaller percentage have ever had the opportunity to see what content can be found there. One blog post will probably not cause an avalanche of visits to the portal’s website (although I could be wrong, of course), but if at least one of the readers makes use of it, I will certainly have a sense of personal satisfaction. Why is the e-Justice portal worth our attention?
Well, first of all, it is a source of knowledge about the functioning of the justice system in individual European Union countries, and it is maintained in all official EU languages, including, of course, our native language. If I also mention that using it is completely free and does not require – in its basic version – any login, I hope that everyone is now convinced that it is worth using the e-Justice portal. In search of answers to questions such as: how to verify whether our foreign contractor actually exists, how to find a lawyer in Germany, how to use the electronic land register in the Czech Republic, etc., it is worth visiting the portal run by the European Commission together with the ministries of justice from the EU. At one time, I conducted research on the functionality of the e-Justice portal, and the results were published in the e-mentor journal. I therefore refer those interested in this topic to read the article and share their observations.
In my opinion, it is worth paying special attention to the possibility of using a wizard on the e-Justice portal that allows for the preparation of documents in the European order for payment procedure and the European Small Claims Procedure. The wizard is designed in such a way that by going through the subsequent steps, we de facto fill in the individual fields corresponding to the fields contained in the procedural document forms, which are annexes to EU regulations 1896/2006 and 861/2007, regulating the aforementioned European court proceedings. Although this functionality does not yet allow for the electronic submission of documents to the appropriate court, it constitutes a significant facilitation in their construction.
If any of the readers are interested in fully electronic European court proceedings, I invite you to take part in one of the pilots under the e-CODEX project. A lawsuit directed to Greece, Austria, or Germany no longer has to be sent by traditional mail and cost us many nervous days and nights waiting for information from the Court that the documents have been delivered. It is enough to create an account on the e-CODEX platform and be a holder of a Polish secure electronic signature with a qualified certificate, and the entire procedure can be carried out fully electronically. Details regarding the pilots will appear soon in the next blog post. In the meantime, I invite you to visit the page http://www.e-codex.pl/pilotaz.html or the comment of the week, where I have already written a few words on this subject.