Frans van Dijk - Congruence of Society and Judiciary

Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Pattern Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is about the perception of the independence of the judiciary in Europe. Do citizens and judges see it in the same way? Do judges feel that their independence is respected by the users of the courts, by the leadership of the courts and by politicians? Does the population trust the judiciary more than other public institutions, or less? How does independence of the judiciary work at the national level and at the level of the European Union? These interrelated questions are particularly relevant in times when the independence of the judiciary is under political pressure in several countries in the European Union. The judiciary may not have direct democratic legitimacy, but how the judiciary and its core value, independence, are perceived in society is stillor even more soimportant. At the end of the day, these perceptions determine popular support of the judiciary in society, and thereby its position in the trias politica.

Surveys among judges, lay judges and lawyersin addition to regular surveys among the general public organized by the European Commissionprovide a wealth of information to answer all of these questions. The surveys were conducted by the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ), encompassing all countries that participated in its work, whether or not these countries have councils for the judiciary. The surveys are a part of the ENCJs efforts to improve independence and accountability of the judiciaries of Europe, by setting standards and measuring the realization of these standards, as well as measuring independence and accountability in general. The survey among lawyers was organized together with the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE).

These instruments were developed in a project I coordinated, on behalf of The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary. At that time, I was director of The Netherlands Council. This book was not commissioned by the ENCJ and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the ENCJ, and neither does it reflect the opinion of The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary. I wrote this book in my capacity as professor of Empirical Analysis of Legal Systems at the Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice of Utrecht University. The book combines the outcomes of the surveys that have been conducted in this field. Its approach is primarily descriptive. It presents descriptive statistics, and occasionally some linear regressions, primarily for the purpose of illustration. I hope the analysis presented here is accessible to a broad audience. This is a first step, and further research is needed into the underlying mechanisms of the formation of perceptions of judicial independence.

I would like to thank the colleagues from the judiciaries of Europe that participated in the development and execution of the ENCJ-surveys, and in particular past and present presidents of the ENCJ, Geoffrey Vos, Nuria Diaz Abad, Kees Sterk and Filippo Donati, and the director of the ENCJ, Monique van der Goes. The survey among lay judges was made possible by Wiggo Storhaug Larssen. I would like to thank Sarah Koolen, in particular, for doing much of the organizational work on the surveys. Chapter 4 of this book contains joint work with Bart Diephuis and Frank van Tulder of The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary. I would like to thank Bart Diephuis for additional statistical analyses. And finally, I would like to thank the ENCJ and the Montaigne Centre for covering the costs of open access.