site.bta European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Jourova: Bulgaria and Romania on Right Track and Not Any Worse than Other Member States

European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Jourova: Bulgaria and Romania on Right Track and Not Any Worse than Other Member States

Brussels, April 10 (BTA corr. Nikolay Jeliazkov) - The European Commission (EC) Monday published its 2017 EU Justice Scoreboard which gives a comparative overview of the efficiency, quality and independence of justice systems in the EU Member States.

The Justice Scoreboard is intended as a means to assist national authorities to improve the effectiveness of their justice systems. Compared to previous editions, the 2017 Scoreboard looks into new aspects of the functioning of justice systems, for example, how easily consumers can access justice and which channels they use to submit complaints against companies, the EC said in a press release. For the first time, the scoreboard also shows the length of criminal court proceedings relating to money laundering offences.

Dwelling on Bulgaria and Romania during the presentation of the scoreboard, European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Vera Jourova said that she was happy that the two countries are on the right track and not any worse than other Member States. Jurova said that the figures for Bulgaria and Romania in the 2017 EU Justice Scoreboard may be used as a good element when assessing the fulfilling of the measures and tasks in the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM).

CVM is a tool by which the EC has been monitoring Bulgaria's progress in reforming its judiciary and fiighting high-lever corruption and organized crime ever since it joined the EU in 2007.

Jurova said that during all of her mandate she has always wanted to to make CVM as concrete as possible, and make it "like milestones for Bulgaria and Romania so that they know exactly what to do, what the Commission wants them to do and by when". "We were quite clear and concrete in the last CVM reports that we want to receive tangible and sustainable results and that the countries are going in the right direction. But we need sustainable results on the ground," she said.

"In Bulgaria we want to see more reforms and better justice response against organized crime and money laundering, and more efficient action against corruption," Jurova said.

Commenting the number of the judges in Bulgaria, the Commissioner said that it is quite high and not in correlation with the length of proceedings. "When we see long proceedings in the Member States, it might be the case that they do not have sufficient capacities, they do not have good enough organization of the work of the courts, be it the work of judges and officers and personnel," Jurova said.

The scoreboard figures show that Bulgaria spends more and more on justice and that as a GDP percentage, this spending is the highest in the entire EU, increasing to 0.67 per cent in 2015, from 0.6 per cent in 2010.

More about the 2017 EU Justice Scoreboard and a link to the full report is available at: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-890_en.htm.