On discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget on the 2022 discharge: General budget of the EU - Court of Justice of the European Union

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SUGGESTIONS

The Committee on Legal Affairs calls on the Committee on Budgets, as the committee responsible, to incorporate the following suggestions into its motion for a resolution:

1. Appreciates the high rate of use of the final appropriations for 2022 (98.4 %), as in previous years (98.7% for 2021 and 99% for 2020);

2. Stresses that the budget of the CJEU is essentially administrative, with around 75% of the appropriations related to expenditure for Members and staff, and almost all of the rest related to expenditure for buildings and IT;

3. Notes that the average length of proceedings for cases completed before the Court of Justice remained similar to that of the previous year (16.4 months in 2022, 16.6 months in 2021);

4. Welcomes the fact that the average length of proceedings for cases completed before the General Court has decreased to 16.2 months in 2022 (17.3 months in 2021);

5. Notes that the number of cases brought before the two courts in 2022 is comparable to that of the previous year (1 710 cases in 2022, as against 1 720 in 2021) and underlines that, together, the Court of Justice and the General Court were able to complete 1 666 cases in 2022 ( 1 723 in 2021), which corresponds to the average in recent years (1 692 cases per year between 2018 and 2021);

6. Acknowledges the pursuit of the activities carried out by the Judicial Network of the European Union, which contributes to fostering and facilitating the cooperation between the CJEU and the national courts, particularly in the fields of judicial monitoring, legal research, multilingual terminology and emerging technologies, as well as to promoting the pooling of the most efficient practices in the administration of justice;

7. Welcomes the setting up of a streaming system for hearings of the Court of Justice which serves to strengthen the CJEU’s ‘Citizen Court’ dimension through increased accessibility for the general public;

8. Appreciates the makeover of the CJEU’s Annual Report with a view of improving transparency and giving better visibility of its activities;

9. Notes with satisfaction the advances in the development of the CJEU’s Integrated Case Management System (SIGA) which will replace a large number of applications currently in use, thus offering the possibility of greater optimisation and automation of the various stages of case processing;

10. Notes with satisfaction the upward trend of the use rate of e-Curia: in 2022, 94% of lodgements before the General Court were made via e-Curia (93% in 2021) and the use rate of e-Curia at the Court of Justice was approximately 87% of all lodgements made this way (compared to 85% in 2021);

11. Welcomes the fact that the proportion of women in managerial posts remains at a high level (40% in 2022 as in 2021), confirming the global upward trend recorded since 2018 (41% in 2020, 39% in 2019 and 37.5% in 2018).