The Conference of Chief Justices of the Supreme Courts of Central & Eastern Europe

In 2007, the CEELI Institute helped launch the Conference of Chief Justices of Central & Eastern Europe, which annually brings together the senior judges from the region’s highest courts to share and develop strategies and best practices to promote judicial integrity and accountability, to improve court management, and to combat corruption in the courts. The CEELI Institute’s efforts have supported the work of the Conference since its inception.

The Conference was launched in Prague, at the Institute, with the personal involvement and commitment of United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The Conference continues to be a self-sustaining body that meets annually in one of the participating countries. Conferences over the past several years have been hosted by the Chief Justices of Albania (2012), Montenegro (2013), Georgia (2014), Croatia (2015), Serbia (2016), Hungary (2017), Lithuania (2018) and Slovakia (2019). The 2020 Conference was held online, hosted by the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan.

The CEELI Institute continues to provide guidance and expertise to the Conference, led by the efforts of CEELI Institute Board member, Judge John M. Walker, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Walker is joined in this effort by Judge Clifford J. Wallace, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, whose extensive experience includes establishing a similar conference for the countries of Asia and the Pacific.

Among the notable achievements of the Conference was the signing, in 2015, of a Statement of Principles of the Independence of the Judiciary (known now as the Brijuni Statement after the name of the seaside Croatian town where it was drafted). The Brijuni Statement represents a reaffirmation of a long-held and shared belief amongst its signatories in judicial independence as critical to upholding the rule of law. Nineteen Supreme Courts have now signed the Statement, and it has been translated into six languages.  The Statement is an important affirmation of judicial independence in a region where that principle continues to be undermined and challenged.

Judicial Training on EU Law and Treaties: Partnering with the Association of Croatian Judges

The CEELI Institute is continuing its partnership with the Association of Croatian Judges to deliver a series of legal education programs for judges from Central and Eastern European Union member states on relevant EU instruments and directives governing the application of both civil and criminal law—norms which are often not fully applied in national courts.

The project is designed to promote greater understanding among CEE judges on the appropriate application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as well as selected EU directives in both civil and criminal law.  Simultaneous interpretation into Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, and Romanian will make the program broadly accessible for non-English speaking judges from across the region.

Funded by the European Commission, this project reflects our well-established partnership with the Association of Croatian Judges, which has included a successful collaboration on an ongoing series of international judicial conferences in Croatia and the Czech Republic.

India: Judicial Exchanges and Curriculum Development

The CEELI Institute continues our multi-year partnership with the National Judicial Academy (NJA) of India and the U.S. Federal Judicial Center (FJC), to promote exchanges between U.S. and Indian judges, and to develop a practical curriculum focused on issues related to adjudication of cases involving complex transnational crimes. Previous outcomes of this partnership included development and roll-out of first India-specific counterterrorism curriculum to be used at the NJA, designed for Indian trial court judges on the frontline in handling terrorism cases. That curriculum reflects Indian national legislation and judicial practice, while at the same time incorporating a modern pedagogical approach in lieu of more traditional lecture-based teaching methodology. Eight Indian high court justices worked with experts from the FJC and with US judges to design and refine the curriculum.

In 2019, the Institute helped the NJA successfully launch the curriculum, with three separate sessions of the course being delivered at the NJA in Bhopal, India, for a total of 80 trial court judges. Over the next two years, we plan to expand on this successful groundwork, enlarging the scope of relevant course curricula, and engaging with additional members of the Indian judiciary from across the subcontinent.
 

CEELI’s work in India has been so successful that it was highlighted at a panel at the 2019 biannual conference of the International Organization of Judicial Training’s (IOJT), held in Cape Town, South Africa. The panel, “Adjudicating Terrorism-Related Cases: A Curriculum Development Model,” highlighted CEELI’s multi-year project working with the NJA and the FJC. The unique project model, which coupled training on modern pedagogy for judges with the creation of a national counterterrorism curriculum, drew wide praise from representatives from judicial training institutions from around the world, many of which struggle to incorporate modern teaching techniques into their systems.