CAPGEMINI SE Copyright © BusinessAMBE 2023
According to a study by consultant
- Belgian judges have been complaining for a long time about the high workload and the many dossiers to be completed: the turnaround time of trials at the justice system is dramatic, the mill runs particularly slowly, the judicial backlog for some cases is absurd.
Capgemini specifically calculated the problem via workload measurement. The results are telling: on average, a judge works 52.8 hours per week. If one did not work overtime, the judicial backlog would grow by 30 percent.-
The solution, which does tend to come from the government: hire more people. It would be best to add 43 percent or nearly 700 judges, the report concludes. But people will still have to work overtime to get everything done. And the study doesn't even take into account the already existing backlog, which is particularly notorious at the
Brussels Court of Appeals . -
Earlier, a ruling forced the federal government to write out vacancies and search for a hundred or so magistrates. This even involved penalty payments of
1,000 euros per day per unfilled position. Bizarre legal quirk here: these sums apply only to writing out the vacancies, not to filling them. - The latter is precisely the problem. Legally trained candidates are not keen on a job as a judge, and the number of candidates has declined sharply over the past decade. Among other things, the extra administrative work is perceived as a burden: perhaps the government should do something about that, too.
- Van Tigchelt is not inventing hot water in this regard: in addition to recruitment, he also wants to tackle work efficiency. The digitization of justice plays a major role in this, the minister says: also not for the first time that this is said about the department.
© The Content Exchange, source
