Preface
I am honoured to be able to introduce the ERA annual report for 2024. I am all the more delighted because my involvement with ERA dates back to a time when my country of origin was not yet part of the European Union. In this respect, I am hardly an exception, given that for many lawyers, ERA constitutes a point of departure regarding EU law.
Indeed, the endeavour of contributing to ensuring that future generations of lawyers not yet acquainted with the intricacies of EU law benefit from the same experience, is an ongoing one. It therefore comes as no surprise that in 2024 ERA strengthened its cooperation with lawyers from countries aspiring to EU membership. One only has to mention the increasing number of activities for practitioners from the Western Balkans as well as the strengthening of contacts with the legal community in Ukraine and Moldova. All of this will surely assist them on their way into the EU. In this connection, this year left a lasting mark with the accession of Serbia to the ERA Foundation. I deliberately emphasise this aspect of ERA’s activities at the beginning of this preface, because it tends to be overlooked by many ’old wolves’ of EU law, for whom the world revolves exclusively around the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. For important as the latter may be, it is merely one piece of the puzzle called EU law.
Let me dedicate the remarks which follow to my observation of ERA’s activities, based on our long-standing cooperation and marked by the fact that I am one of the longest-serving members of the Board of Trustees. It is two things that I would like to emphasise in this context.
ERA acts as a connector that creates bonds. One of these connections creating bonds, namely the support for countries aspiring to EU membership, has already been mentioned. Other connections are no less important. First and foremost, it is about bringing those who apply the law on a daily basis far away from Brussels or Luxembourg into the orbit of being a ‘European lawyer’. Over the past decades, I have met a number of lawyers who did not (yet) have any idea of what EU law is. But they had all heard about ERA. Another aspect of creating bonds is establishing relationships between lawyers operating in different dimensions. Events organised by ERA constitute a formidable platform for lawyers of any background to meet and exchange views. Practitioners from the Member States, including trainees in all legal professions, can exchange their experiences with those who deal almost exclusively with EU law within the EU institutions. And it is also hard not to emphasise that the lawyers who are currently functioning within the ‘Luxembourg-Brussels bubble’ (like myself) can — thanks to ERA’s events — look at the problems related to the application of EU law on the ground, that is to say the national, regional or even local level.
The second aspect of ERA’s uniqueness is that the events it organises consistently respond to the current needs and challenges faced by the EU and its legal system. I would like to think and hope that the brainstorming sessions taking place at the Board of Trustees meetings contribute to this. EU law is in constant evolution. Sometimes this is due to the new competences or new legal instruments. Sometimes the EU has to respond to internal challenges resulting from occurrences emerging in some Member States – as in relation to the rule of law crisis. Sometimes the EU must take on global challenges, as is currently the case with the potential trade war and the need to radically strengthen the European defence policy. Last year’s publication of the jubilee book on European sovereignty and numerous conferences on the rule of law deserve special mention.
Last but not least, I would like to take the opportunity of writing this preface to pay special tribute to the entire ERA team, led by Jean-Philippe Rageade. All members of the ERA team impress me with their professionalism, passion and commitment to defending European values through the means of law. And I am particularly looking forward to meeting some of them at the upcoming FIDE Congress 2025, to be held in Katowice at the end of May (www.fide2025.eu)!
Maciej SZPUNAR
First Advocate General at the Court
of Justice of the European Union
Messages from
our boards
Jean-Claude
JUNCKER
Former President of the European Commission
President of the ERA Governing Board
A few months after Albania, the Republic of Serbia joined the ERA Foundation in June 2024, thanks in particular I am delighted to say to the strong support ERA has been providing to the country’s legal and judicial stakeholders. I can see the expectations of Serbian legal practitioners to move closer to the standards and values of the European Union. In the same vein, the wish expressed by the judicial stakeholders in Ukraine and Moldova to benefit from ERA’s support shortly after the European Union decided to open accession negotiations is another encouraging sign. In all our Member States and beyond, there is an appetite for more Europe. The fact that the Academy recorded the highest number of participants in its history in 2024 is a further illustration of this. I would like to thank all the ERA patrons, the European Union and the German Land of Rhineland Palatinate for supporting this unique and truly European institute.
Marc
VAN DER WOUDE
President of the General Court of the European Union
Chair of the ERA Board of Trustees
Along with my colleagues Adriana de Buerba and Iris Goldner Lang, I would like to thank the ERA trustees for electing us to chair the Board for the term of office 2024-2027. With regard to its composition, the new Board has been largely reshuffled, further feminised – also broadened geographically to include representatives from the Western Balkans. At its inaugural plenary meeting in June 2024, the Board members were able to provide in-depth advice to the ERA team on strategic issues, in particular on its response to the forthcoming influx of European legal instruments on digitalisation in the field of justice, on the need for better cooperation with universities, or on fundraising opportunities to finance additional activities in the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova.
Sabine
VERHEYEN MEP
First Vice-President of the European Parliament
Chair of the ERA Executive Board
Ongoing support for ERA, a child of the European Parliament, is in the genuine interest of the European Union and its institutions, not least in the context of Western Balkan enlargement and with regard to Ukraine and Moldova. Training and education on European legal issues are extremely important tasks, not only for the EU candidate countries, but also for strengthening the rule of law in the old Member States and for promoting judicial independence, democracy and European values.
I would like to thank the ERA Governing Board for the renewed confidence it has shown in me by appointing me as Chair of its Executive Board and I look forward to supporting ERA in my new role as First Vice-President of the European Parliament.
Interview with
the director
Judging by the number of participants in your activities, 2024 was an excellent year. Can you tell us more?
Indeed, with almost 9,300 legal practitioners participating in our training programmes in 2024, we are well beyond the previous record, set in 2021. But the comparison stops there, because 2021 was a catch-up year for activities that could not be organised at the height of the pandemic in 2020.
While I make no secret of the fact that this new record is a source of satisfaction and pride for the entire ERA team, who have worked very hard to reach this result, there are other figures that deserve to be highlighted just as much. I will mention three of them. The first is participation in our introductory training programmes, essentially our week-long summer courses. With 15 summer courses offered in 2024, we welcomed more than 550 practitioners, which represents an increase of more than 30% on previous years. The second concerns the lawyers in private practice, one of our traditional target groups. More than 1,500 attended our events in 2024, confirming the strategy we have pursued in recent years of considerably strengthening cooperation with national and local bar associations. The last relates to the scope of our activities in and for the Western Balkans: 450 legal professionals from this region, mainly from Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, attended our training courses in 2024, an increase of 50% compared to the year before.
Alongside the accurate and informed identification of training needs by our team, one main reason for the high level of attendance at our events, culminating in 2024, is undoubtedly the profound transformation of ERA's training portfolio in recent years, in particular the digitalisation and diversification of its programmes. In 2024, 37% of our activities were offered online-only, 46% in face-to-face format and 17% in hybrid format. In total, 46% of our participants attended our training programmes remotely, which shows that the diversification of our training offer and the fact that 54% of our training activities could be accessed by practitioners regardless of their location, met the expectations of our target groups and allowed us to reach an enlarged audience. It is key for ERA to be efficient in its outreach, taking into consideration the changing training needs of legal practitioners and remaining innovative for them.
This (r)evolution of ERA's activities has required significant financial investment in our conference facilities in Trier since 2022 – also made possible thanks to a grant from the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate. The last major investment in 2024 was the conversion of a room into a dedicated, fully-equipped video studio, complemented by a fully-fledged mobile conference system that enables ERA to hold hybrid events outside Trier in full autonomy. After only a few months, the new video studio has become an essential element in our production of online educational resources.
Jean-PhilippeRageade
Speaking of online educational resources – they seem to take up an increasingly significant place in the ERA catalogue. Why are they so important to you?
This is true. Originally conceived as mere by-products of our training activities, they have grown in importance and scope over the years to become not only an important pillar of our activities, but also a crucial way of maximising our impact.
Our e-learning courses belong to this category. Since 2021, we have renewed and considerably expanded our range of free introductory e-learning courses, with the aim of providing a point of reference for practitioners in search of knowledge when they need it. In 2024, some judicial training institutes, mainly in the EU candidate countries, expressed the wish – which we supported – to translate these courses into their national languages and adapt them slightly for their judges and prosecutors.
Another tool is our e-presentations, the total number of which surpassed the symbolic 1,000-unit mark in 2024. Combining the video and presentation from an ERA event with supporting documentation and a self-assessment quiz, each e-presentation is available on our e-learning platform and on the online platform of the renowned legal publishing company vLex.
Further educational videos and podcasts are also hosted on ERA’s YouTube channel, which saw its subscriptions increase by 10% in 2024 compared to the previous year, to reach 3,300. In 2024, a new series called ‘ERA Talks’ was launched on our channel. The aim of ERA Talks is to explain and discuss some of the current challenges facing the European Union through interviews with prominent figures from the legal, judicial, and political sectors that make Europe what it is. The first two episodes feature interviews with the Polish Minister of Justice, Adam Bodnar, and the First Vice President of the European Parliament, Sabine Verheyen. Further episodes are scheduled in 2025, featuring among others the President of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Koen Lenaerts, and the former President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker.
Against the backdrop of an increasing number of online resources produced mainly through our EU-funded activities, we launched the dedicated webpage www.resources.era.int in 2024, which hosts a collection of multilingual training materials covering various topics related to EU law, to be downloaded and used free of charge. All these resources have been developed in close collaboration with national judicial training institutes (EJTN members), bar associations and other judicial/legal stakeholders, as well as renowned academic institutions across Europe.
Publications are one more example of the way in which ERA maximises the impact of its programmes. Our quarterly law review ERA Forum, published by Springer, features a selection of the best papers presented at ERA events. In 2024 alone, there were over 200,000 downloads of ERA Forum articles. Thanks to special agreements with a number of academic institutions, more and more of these articles are made available for free under an open access licence, thus ensuring even wider access to the results of ERA’s work programme. According to Google Scholar, ERA Forum is ranked 6/20 among the top European law journals. Still speaking about publications, 2024 also saw the long-awaited release of the book entitled ‘European Sovereignty – the legal dimension’ with Springer, which is based on the contributions to the congress organised by ERA to mark its 30th anniversary.
In 2024, ERA carried out an evaluation of the progress made in achieving the objectives of its Development Strategy 2021-2027. What was the outcome of this exercise?
The limited scope of this interview does not allow for an exhaustive presentation of the mid-term review of the Development Strategy adopted by our Governing Board in November. At best, I can mention a few projects that are closely linked to the strategy and that have been launched since 2022 to become an integral part of ERA's regular programme, such as the European Patent Litigation Certificate (EPLC) or the Young European Lawyers' Academy (YELA) - the latter complementing the pre-existing Young European Lawyers' Contest (YELC). Another example is the European Forum of the Legal Professions (EUFLP), which held its third annual conference in 2024 under the title ’Improving Justice through Innovation - From Challenges and Needs to Best Practices‘, attracting 380 participants. By providing a different framework for cooperation with the legal professions, this flagship project of the current strategy has broadened both the profile and the mission of ERA.
The Development Strategy being only half-way through, there is still much to be done in various areas, such as the digitalisation of our organisation, employer branding, staff upskilling, social media strategy. Regarding our activities, I would, however, like to underline two areas of priority for the remaining period of our strategy.
The first concerns our links with universities and students, which we intend to strengthen. In particular, we intend to develop multi-level cooperation with the Jean Monnet Chairs, Modules and Centres of Excellence, which represent the leading higher education institutions in the field of European law. One way of working with universities would also be to respond to the growing trend among practitioners to seek academic qualifications through long-term professional training programmes – similar to the EPLC mentioned above, which is implemented in collaboration with the University of Maastricht. Co-operation with universities will be sought to provide validating/qualifying training courses for people already in work. ERA is also exploring the possibility of working with universities to involve their students in business consultancy projects. Initial contacts were made with Queen Mary University of London and The Hague University of Applied Sciences in 2024, and 2025 will see whether this model of cooperation is mutually beneficial. With regards to law students, as they are not the primary target group of a professional training institute such as ours, our offer has mainly consisted of internships so far. However, targeting law students should be seen as a long-term investment and can help ERA to better understand the native digital generation and their expectations for future professional training, clearly a priority for ERA.
The second priority I would like to underline concerns our work for the EU candidate countries. While ERA has been able to draw closer to the Western Balkan States since 2022 with a certain degree of success – as illustrated by the accession of the Republic of Serbia to our Foundation in June 2024 – a comparable rapprochement with Ukraine could not be achieved to the same extent. However, in 2024 contacts were made with the judicial training institutes and bar association’s training centres in Ukraine and Moldova and discussions started to support them on their path to EU accession. These contacts led to the organisation of a one-week study visit in Trier in January 2025, enabling us to discuss in-depth the needs and expectations for training of legal professionals in EU law in the two countries and to develop with them a comprehensive training strategy for the coming years. While continuing our work for and in the Western Balkans, we will strive to follow the same approach with Ukraine and Moldova. With the aim of financing additional activities for the EU candidate countries, more attention should also be paid to the ‘ERA Fund for the Western Balkans und Ukraine’ – which launched its first fundraising campaign in the first quarter of 2024.
Let's conclude the interview with a few words about the 2024 European elections.
To what extent do or will they impact your work?
The impact is obviously significant, particularly on the content of our activities. We are therefore trying to anticipate any developments as far as possible. Let me give you two examples. As soon as they were made public, the political guidelines ‘Europe's Choice’, which set out the legislative agenda of the new European Commission for the term of office 2024-2029, were analysed by our team with a view to starting to contribute to them through our work programme from 2025 onwards.
On another front, we know that the new European Commission will adopt – probably in the course of 2025 – the long-awaited Judicial Training Strategy, and that this should focus on the digitalisation of both judicial training and justice. This is a subject whose legal aspects have been covered exhaustively by ERA for some years now, both in our training programmes and within the bodies of our Foundation. For instance, a workshop was organised at the 2024 plenary meeting of the Board of Trustees – with the participation of the European Commission – on the theme ‘How should ERA best respond to the flood of European legal instruments on digitalisation that are about to be adopted’.
The Academy has also participated in the public debate on these issues: in November 2024, we were invited to present our training strategy on AI and the digitalisation of justice at the high-level expert conference ‘Enhancing European Legal Competitiveness – AI and Advanced Technologies for Better Justice and Legislation’ organised under the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the EU.
Another impact of the European elections is on finances, as ERA's main source of funding is the grant it receives from the European Commission as a Jean Monnet Designated Institution under the ERASMUS+ Regulation. One of ERA's new strategic priorities will then be to get closer to national and European decision-makers in order to secure a stable funding perspective for the period 2028-2034.
