Warm reception for legal aid proposal

Date: 06/02/1997

By Mark Turner

THE European Commission is considering plans to ensure that all EU citizens have access to legal aid.

Justice Commissioner Anita Gradin has told MEPs that she intends to come forward with proposals to make European legal systems more accessible to ordinary people.

“I am not thinking in terms of harmonisation, but rather of ways and means for the EU to make it easier for individuals to make use of legal aid,” she said.

The move has been warmly welcomed both by civil liberties groups and members of the European Parliament, with MEPs pressing the Commissioner to put flesh on the bones of her idea.

Dutch VVD Euro MP Jan Wiebenga, vice-president of the Parliament's civil liberties and internal affairs committee, said: “In principle I think the idea is a positive one, but it is still very vague. I will ask Anita Gradin to come forward with concrete suggestions to substantiate her speech. This proposal should have hands and feet.”

It is still unclear, however, exactly how the Commission intends to proceed.

The right of individuals to claim legal aid to pursue contentious cases is a source of controversy in some member states, with questions raised about whether it is an appropriate use of taxpayers' money. Any proposal for EU-wide action in this area could be a political hot potato - and one which national governments might be anxious to avoid while the current Intergovernmental Conference negotiations are continuing.

But the idea has been warmly welcomed by the lobbying group Fair Trials Abroad (FTA), which argues that all Europeans should have the right to access to justice when outside their own country.

“We are demanding things that already ought to be there,” said FTA's head Steven Jakobi. “The European Convention on Human Rights states that people must be given a fair trial and have access to a competent lawyer. But we are finding that in southern Europe, people without private lawyers are seriously disadvantaged in their search for justice.”

The trouble is especially acute for foreigners, as they are more likely to be held in custody awaiting trial than locals, adds Jakobi, who says he has received numerous complaints about lawyers turning up at trials to defend clients with no prior knowledge of the case.

The worst instances, he claims, are in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Northern EU member states have a far better record in providing adequate defence.

FTA is calling on the EU to create a Europe-wide public defendant or legal aid system.

“Defendants should have access to translation - already a requirement of the human rights convention - and a lawyer at an early stage in the proceedings. That is all we are asking,” said Jakobi.

But any proposal from the Commission on legal aid would have to vie with a range of other competing ideas, perhaps more pressing in the eyes of national governments.

Experts are already working flat out on ways to speed up and improve judicial cooperation between member states, and are unlikely to complete that work before the end of the Dutch presidency.

One problem is that it is difficult to assess how widespread legal aid shortfalls are. “It would be a major task to research this accurately,” said Jakobi.