EJTN 2012

The Exchange Programmefor Judicial AuthoritiesLaunched as an initiative of the EuropeanParliament (Resolution A5-0039/2003), theExchange Programme is a unique, handsontraining experience that allows judgesand prosecutors to directly witness thedaily work of their counterparts in differentEuropean Union countries.The Exchange Programme’s mainpurpose is to increase participants’awareness of others’ judicialsystems.The method chosen favours the developmentof a European judicial culture basedon mutual trust between judicial authoritiesbelonging to a common European judicialarea. At the same time, the Programme hasalso shown to reinforce the implementationof the principle of mutual recognition ofjudicial decisions within the EuropeanUnion.Thanks to the financial support of theEuropean Commission, EJTN has beensuccessfully implementing the ExchangeProgramme for Judicial Authorities since2005, in close cooperation with partnersall across Europe. In 2007, EJTN wasgranted a de facto monopoly position forthe implementation of these exchangesby the European Commission (DecisionE/1215/2006).Since the first Exchange Programme,approximately 4300 European judges,prosecutors and judicial trainers havebenefited from this experience. Since itsinception, the number of participantshas increased sevenfold, making 2012yet another milestone as the ExchangeProgramme counted 1222 participants –representing a 28% increase as comparedto the previous year.EJTN’s Exchange Programme WorkingGroup is in charge of establishing theoverall policy applying to the executionof the Exchange Programme, in closecooperation with the national contactpoints and the EJTN Secretariat.In 2012, the partners of the ExchangeProgramme were the Ministry of Justice andthe Association of Austrian AdministrativeJudges (Austria), the Judicial TrainingInstitute (Belgium), the National Instituteof Justice (Bulgaria), the Judicial Academy(Croatia), the Judicial Academy (CzechRepublic), the Danish Courts Administration(Denmark), the Supreme Court and theProsecutor’s Office (Estonia), the Ministry11