Cyprus Mail 4 March 2019 - article by Elias Hazou
A team of British legal experts is on the island to take stock of an ongoing programme for reform in the justice system.
Led by Lord John Dyson, the team met on Monday with the institutions committee of the supreme court.
During their stay in Cyprus, the foreign experts will also be meeting with the Courts Reform Steering Committee and the bar association.
In what is an EU-funded project, the team has been tasked with reviewing the courts’ civil procedure rules.
The foreign experts had come to Cyprus in May 2018, at which time they presented to the supreme court their preliminary recommendations for improving civil procedure rules.
A month later the supreme court’s institutions committee published a progress report on its website.
The final report of the British experts is scheduled to be unveiled in May this year.
The EU Justice Scoreboard 2017 showed that while perceived judicial independence is relatively high in Cyprus, achieving greater efficiency in the system remained “a serious challenge”.
It noted that the length of court proceedings and the level of backlogs in litigious civil and commercial cases are among the highest in the EU.
As regards the quality of the Cypriot justice system, the EU Justice Scoreboard also showed that deficiencies regarding the availability and use of information and communication technologies, that a low proportion of judgements are accessible online, that alternative dispute resolution methods are rarely utilised, and that standards on timing for case management or other performance measures are lacking.
Significant delays of up to four years in courts of first instance, and a further delay of up to five years on appeals, led to a situation where the state was required by the European Court of Human Rights to pay damages to citizens impacted by those delays.
