Conference on ”e-Justice - Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Era”, May 20th-21st, 2019

Source: Romanian presidency of the EU (Romanian presidency) i, published on Wednesday, May 22 2019.

In the context of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Ministry of Justice, in collaboration with the European Commission organised the Conference ”e-Justice - Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Era”, between May 20th-21st, 2019, in Bucharest.

The conference addressed IT specialists, practitioners and decision-makers within the judicial systems and proposed to provide a forum to discuss the importance of using new technologies in the field of justice (eg artificial intelligence, Blockchain, process automation, etc.), while aiming at encouraging participants to reflect both on the opportunities and the challenges posed by the rapid pace of technological progress as well as on the philosophical and ethical aspects generated by the implementation of such instruments in the field of justice.

At the opening of the session, Mr. Ion Popa, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice emphasized that ”the continuous development and improvement of the informatic tools which are at the disposal of the judges and the justice are a sine-qua-non condition of the evolution of a judicial system. Furthermore, in our situation of the Member States, we consider that we must pay particular attention to facilitating European cross-border cooperation with the technology”.

The continuation of the commitments of the last decade, redeemed - concretely - by the projects foreseen in the Strategy and the Action Plan, proves, on one hand, that the e-Justice of Europe works both for the benefit of the citizens and for the benefit of the actors/ professionals involved in the judicial procedures, improving access to justice and enhancing mutual trust between the Member States of the European Union, on the other.

The focus of the conference was to encourage participants to reflect on the opportunities and challenges posed by the rapid pace of technological progress as well as on the philosophical and ethical aspects of the implementation of such instruments in the field of justice.

Romania encourages the use of modern technologies - such as automatic machine learning, artificial intelligence - to support the work of judicial systems, and is equally concerned with providing the necessary legal framework for their use.