Collapsing sewage drains in Brussels’ landmark Palais de Justice, judicial clerks striking in Lisbon, years-long waits for hearings in London. After years of underfunding in justice systems across Europe, the continent is grappling with a crisis in its courts.
Over the past decade, as Europe has faced stuttering economies, a wrenching pandemic and the impact of war, justice has routinely been targeted for spending cuts by governments that have prioritised other parts of the public realm such as healthcare and education.
The result has been crumbling courts and shortages of publicly funded lawyers, creating record case backlogs and eroding trust in the justice system in a host of countries. The problems have become so severe that leading lawyers warn they threaten to undermine the rule of law, which underpins European institutions and cross-border trade.
Europe’s slow-burning malaise has taken a different form from the sudden, convulsive crisis Donald Trump has brought upon the US legal establishment, pushing executive power to the point of outright defiance of the judiciary.
Direct threats to the rule of law — with politicians bearing down on courts from Spain to Hungary — feature in parts of Europe too. But they sit alongside more chronic and creeping problems in the administration of justice that span much of the continent’s national courts, and appear no easier to solve.
A civil or commercial first instance case in Italy, one of the EU’s top four economies, can take a year and a half to clear if proceedings run at their typical pace. In France, Spain and Poland, it is barely less than a year on average for a routine case.
Criminal court backlogs have hit a record high in England and Wales in the UK, while countries including Greece, Italy and Albania are also struggling to reduce the time it takes to conclude criminal cases.
In March, a defendant in London charged with threatening the public with a machete was told that his three-day trial could not take place until October 2028. His Honour Judge Charles Falk responded “wow” when his clerk told him the next available date.
And even the more routine disputes are taking years to resolve.
A litigious divorce in Monaco took an average of 1,292 days to handle in 2022, a timeframe that has been increasing almost consistently since 2012, according to the Council of Europe’s latest report on the quality of justice in Europe.
Among the 46 member states in the Council of Europe — set up in the wake of the second world war to protect the rule of law — the average budget allocated to the judicial system was 0.31 per cent of GDP in 2022, the report found.
The expenditure equates to about 85 euros per inhabitant and has failed in many countries to keep pace with inflation for nearly a decade. In 2018, the average budget was 0.33 per cent of GDP.
For fiscally strained governments justice has been a lower priority in part because, while all voters are concerned about conspicuous services such as healthcare, only some come into contact with the legal system.
“From an electoral point of view, it’s not so sexy”, said Pierre-Dominique Schupp, president of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe. “Justice has been deprioritised across Europe.”
According to Marc van der Woude, president of the General Court of the European Union, justice has even become an inconvenience to many politicians in Europe in recent years.
The rule of law “is not something which helps you in winning elections. On the contrary, suppressing it often is a means nowadays to get elected”, Van der Woude said.
But however tempting it may have been for governments to starve justice systems of funding, Europe’s legal establishment is increasingly concerned they will regret it.
The UK’s Post Office Horizon IT scandal, in which hundreds of postmasters were wrongly convicted of charges including theft, fraud and false accounting on the basis of faulty computer evidence, did not result directly from spending cuts.
But it did show how miscarriages of justice — among the biggest in British legal history — can capture the public imagination.
When the scandal finally came to a head after a television drama brought the case to the public’s wider attention, the UK government decided it was better to create unprecedented legislation expunging the convictions than leave it to the courts to handle.
The worry is that more high profile scandals will erupt.
Lengthy case backlogs, obstinate officialdom and maladministration also plague civil disputes, covering crucial areas such as housing, immigration and living arrangements for children.
In Cyprus, it takes around 800 days on average to resolve a civil case — the longest in Europe — and that is before any appeals, according to EU data from 2022, the most recent available. Greece and Italy have similarly long timeframes to clear civil and commercial cases from their courts at 746 and 540 days respectively, according to the Council of Europe.
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Governments consistently fail to recognise “that a citizen with a legal problem needs to be treated, like somebody with a health problem”, said legal technology specialist Richard Susskind.
Ongoing disputes can be an “open sore”, analogous to a physical wound, Susskind said. “You don’t hear governments say we’re not funding the health service because we don’t think an open wound is important.”
Clare Ovey, director of Human Rights at the Council of Europe, cites the impact of everyday problems ranging from divorce to residents who simply want to stop neighbours “chucking their rubbish over your hedge”.
“If you have to wait for a long time to have that resolved it can obviously seep into your life,” she said.
The problems are all the more frustrating given the promise of technology. Successful digitisation seems to a large degree to have eluded the justice system.
“They digitise things they shouldn’t and don’t digitise things that they should,” said Penelope Gibbs, director of the charity Transform Justice, in England and Wales.
Public access to case documents in criminal cases is “totally woeful”, she said, adding that some courtroom rules are “draconian”.
Gibbs cites the ban on audio recordings in English courts, which prevents unrepresented defendants — who struggle to follow what was being said — from obtaining transcripts without incurring delays or cost.
In Italy, defendants also have to pay for documents, even a single photocopy, which can add huge expense to a case, according to corporate crime lawyer Filippo Ferri.
“I have crazy experiences with the inefficiencies of judiciary offices,” he said. “For example, you have a procedural mandatory deadline, but you cannot get the relevant case documents in a proper timeframe.”
Many proceedings are “too costly, too time consuming, too combative — and just feel out of place in a digital society”, said Susskind, who for 25 years was technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice, England’s most senior judge.
“The systems are heavily process-based, inefficient bureaucracies,” he said. “It’s a global phenomenon.” Difficulties in the legal system are especially challenging given that “fundamental change requires extensive legislative and regulatory change”, he added.
Yet several top lawyers say progress has been made. “One can overestimate the resistance to change,” said Hugh Mercer KC, chair of the Bar Council for England and Wales’s international committee.
“In the old days it was very hard to get hold of pleadings” which set out a party’s case in civil proceedings in England and Wales, he said. “Now you can get hold of them”, he added, albeit not immediately, and with payment.
Authorities in more jurisdictions are also using technology to hear cases remotely, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced judges to become more comfortable with the practice.
FT series: Broken Justice
This is the first article in a series on Europe’s chronically underfunded justice system that risks undermining the rule of law and scaring off investors.
Part 1 How Europe let its courts decay
Part 2 ‘Millions of flies in the evidence room’ — inside Belgium’s Justice Palace
Part 3 ‘Lawfare’ in Spain — the case against the Sanchez family
Part 4 The rise and fall of the ‘Italian torpedo’
Video hearings in countries including the UK have now become commonplace in a way that was not predicted before the pandemic.
A handful of European nations, including Denmark and Norway, also buck the trend and are among the highest ranked globally in terms of the effectiveness and accessibility of their civil and criminal justice systems, according to the World Justice Project’s 2024 rule of law index.
Still, despite increasing digitalisation in business and other parts of the continent’s public sector, “the usage rate of digital tools in the justice field remains far lower than the rate of their availability”, the Council of Europe report found.
Věra Jourová, who until last year was the European Commission vice-president overseeing the rule of law, in November said it was more important than ever to properly fund justice systems so they can maintain public confidence — not least given the threats to democracy in many European countries.
“Justice is not a luxury,” said Jourová in one of her last public appearances as commissioner. “It is something we need [like] air and clean water.”
Data visualisation by Janina Conboye
