EUDUG General Meeting
28 February 2024, online
The EU Databases User Group held a meeting on 28 February 2024, at which short talks were given about the European e-Justice Portal by Yoana Nikolova (Policy Officer, DG Justice and Consumers, European Commission) and the European Business Registry Association (EBRA) by Maureen O’Sullivan (Registrar of Companies for Companies Registration Office Ireland, and EBRA Board member).
The European e-Justice Portal
Yoana Nikolova (Policy Officer, DG Justice and Consumers, European Commission)
E-justice is the use of information and communications technology in the justice field, facilitating access to justice and increasing transparency. It expedites judicial and administrative processes as well as reducing costs and the administrative burden.
The European e-Justice Portal, launched in 2010, has the ultimate aim of becoming a one-stop shop in the area of justice. Incorporating the European Judicial Atlas and the European Judicial Network in Civil Matters, it now offers 15 tools or dynamic functions as well as 30,000 static information pages on over 150 topics.
The portal is provided by the European Commission but co-owned by the EU member states, who maintain their own information pages. It is available in 23 languages, which is essential for advancing access to justice. The number of portal visits reached almost 7 million in 2023.
The policy is to re-use and link to existing information, rather than duplicating it. For example, the portal links to existing national justice databases and registers – it does not run them.
The main dynamic tools on the European e-Justice Portal are:
- the Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS), also known as ‘Find a Company’;
- the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System (BORIS), providing information about the beneficial owners of companies and trusts (the people who ultimately own or control companies/trusts);
- interconnected land registers;
- dynamic online forms for the service of documents, taking of evidence and other purposes;
- Find a Lawyer and Find a Notary, search engines that connect to existing national databases;
- The European Case Law Identifier search engine, which searches the 13 national case databases that use the ECLI, plus cases from the Court of Justice of the EU;
- the Competent Court Database, which searches court information to find the right contact for particular functions;
- the Consumer Law Database, which provides cases and national transposition information relating to consumer law;
- the Fundamental Rights Interactive Tool, which helps people to find the appropriate organisation to help with rights breaches;
- the ‘Charterclick’ checklist (‘Does the Charter apply to my case’) for determining whether the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights applies to a particular case, together with a Charter tutorial and related information;
- the European Training Platform, offering courses for lawyers and the judiciary.
All parts of the e-Justice portal are open access except the contact information for the European Judicial Network, which is only available to members of the network.
The next steps for the e-Justice Portal will be the launch of ‘My e-Justice Space’ and ‘Find a Bailiff’. My e-Justice Space will provide information and links to online justice procedures, such as initiating a case online.
To receive email updates about the portal, sign up via the ‘Register’ link at the top of the home page.
The ECLI search engine makes available more than 12 million cases. It only covers published decisions and is restricted to cases that member states have made available online. Some member states provide cases online much further back than others; Italy has used EU funding to digitise its entire archive of cases.
Searches can be limited by member state, by court or type of court (courts of first instance, courts of appeal and so on), area of law, date and other criteria; search results can be filtered by court, type of decision, year, et cetera. Key word searches must use the language of the member state/s whose cases you want to find. However, some cases are available in languages other than the vernacular: for example, some German cases are provided in English and/or French.
The European Training Platform can be used by anyone, although the courses to which it links are intended for lawyers and judges. Many of the courses available via the platform are free; some are face-to-face and some are online.
The European Business Registry Association (EBRA)
Maureen O’Sullivan (Registrar of Companies for Companies Registration Office Ireland, and EBRA Board member)
The EBRA was established in 2019 by a merger between the European Business Register and the European Corporate Registers Forum, both of which had been in existence for around 20 years. It has 43 members from 36 countries, including Georgia, Iceland and other non-EU states. National registers are often subject to similar standards in both EU and non-EU countries. The UK is still a member of EBRA and participates in its activities.
Members of the EBRA have opportunities to develop their networks across the continent and can use the association’s online platform, ‘Basecamp’, to post queries and share knowledge. All members meet annually at the EBRA Conference.
There are EBRA working groups focusing on particular issues, such as cyber-security, or the transposition of the EU’s 4th anti-money laundering directive.
Business registers have increasing responsibilities to assess information, not just to record it and make it available. The new registers of beneficial ownerships, required by EU anti-money laundering legislation are posing challenges. A balance needs to be struck between transparency – to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism – and the protection of privacy under GDPR. BORIS (part of the European e-Justice Portal), which links national registers of beneficial ownerships, has been affected by a recent court ruling* that the general public should not have access to beneficial ownership information. Once the GDPR issues have been resolved, BORIS will function as a central register for Europe.
Each country registers the beneficial owners of its own companies and different national registers are taking different approaches to privacy and transparency. In Ireland, the Companies Registration Office has three tiers of access to beneficial ownership data: full access for the police, anti-money laundering authorities and so on; access limited to information about a specified company only, for accountants and others carrying out due diligence checks; and a more restrictive third tier, allowing members of the public to find out if a certain company is on the register and how many beneficial owners it has.
The forthcoming EU directive on digital tools and processes in company law will allow more information to be shared between business registers by electronic means.
The EBRA, together with non-European registers, carries out a global survey of business registers each year and the results are published in the International Business Registers Report (see https://ibrr.net/ ). The report looks at fundamental data – such as registrations, new incorporations and terminations – and focuses on key topics.
In the future, the EBRA plans to deepen engagement with the EU and other policy-makers; it would like a voice at the early stages of policy development. The Association would also like to widen its membership beyond Europe and to cover different types of register.
* Joined Cases C-37/20, Luxembourg Business Registers, and C-601/20, Sovim.
EU Databases User Group (EUDUG) 