Ministry of Justice information report

On Tuesday, 16 August, the Cabinet of Ministers approved the information report prepared by the Ministry of Justice on implementing the investments required to establish the Justice Academy under the European Union Recovery Fund.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice Jānis Bordāns:  “An important prerequisite for the high-quality and faster investigation and adjudication of cases is a common understanding among judges and prosecutors of how legal norms are applied in practice. This will certainly also significantly reduce the number of cases in which differing interpretations—for example, concerning the sufficiency of evidence—have been the reason why the court has been unable to deliver a guilty verdict. In the long term, this could also increase public confidence in court judgments if they are understandable and well reasoned.”

The Justice Academy will be a unified continuing-education and training centre for judges, court employees, prosecutors and assistant prosecutors, and will also provide professional-development activities for investigators on interdisciplinary issues that are essential for the effective conduct of court proceedings. The Ministry of Justice notes that the Justice Academy is intended for judicial authorities and employees to develop their qualifications and skills while performing their official duties; it will not be an institution of higher education, and no qualifications will be obtained there.

The Justice Academy will take a comprehensive approach to developing the professional competences of the judiciary by developing initial training—including training for candidates for judicial office—as well as professional-development programmes and competences in innovation, research and international cooperation. The establishment of the Justice Academy will ensure the possibility of planning, developing and implementing long-term training programmes that successively complement one another.

The report submitted to the government sets out the basic principles and conditions for establishing the Justice Academy: objectives to be achieved; tasks; target groups; the project mission; milestones and interim indicators; funding and expenditure; and the governance and supervision structure.

To ensure the establishment of the Justice Academy, the activities to be carried out are divided into four areas:

1.     administrative activities for launching and implementing the project;

2.     drafting legislation to establish the Justice Academy;

3.     substantive project implementation activities (i.e. training activities);

4.     work to adapt the infrastructure required for the Justice Academy.

The preparation of the information report and its approval by the Cabinet of Ministers are prerequisites for launching the project. It is also planned to begin drafting legislation to establish the Justice Academy this year.

The information report is available on the TAP website.

Additional information:

The establishment of the Justice Academy to improve the qualifications of judges and prosecutors is the Ministry of Justice’s priority project under the European Union Recovery Fund Plan. Funding of EUR 7.5 million from the European Union Recovery Fund is planned for the project for the entire period through 2026. The Justice Academy is planned to begin operating on 1 January 2025.

As part of the justice audit, the State Audit Office’s 2021 audit, “Effectiveness of the Investigation and Adjudication of Criminal Offences in the Economic and Financial Sectors,” found that in at least 69% of the cases analysed in the audit, there was a lack of a common understanding (among investigators and prosecutors, among prosecutors, or between the prosecutor and the court), while in at least 37% of cases, errors had been made in applying legal norms or there was insufficient understanding of the circumstances that had to be proved to establish the elements of a particular criminal offence. The lack of a common understanding of the application of the norms of the Criminal Law contributes to the protraction of criminal proceedings concerning offences in the financial and economic sectors and to a situation in which, in similar or comparable circumstances, persons are held criminally liable in one case but not in another.