Abstract

At the end of the Nineties, policies and projects aimed at improving the quality of justice in the name of efficiency and accountability were introduced within many European national judicial systems. This happened with a decade of delay in respect to other sectors of the public administration. These types of policies were mainly focused on the one hand, on the evaluation of judges and courts performances and, on the other hand, on the introduction of ICTs in the judicial systems. Nowadays, after a decade from the introduction of these innovations, the available data and studies show that, only in a few cases, these policies were successful in introducing significant changes and quality improvements. Moreover, in many cases, these expensive projects were interrupted, during the implementation stage, without any result. On the basis of these assumptions, this article aims to present some examples of projects and policies introduced in some European countries. These examples have been selected as they allow to underline both critical and positive factors that influenced the policies implementation processes and, consequently, their results. The overall aim of the article is to emphasize that, also in the justice sector, as well as in other public administration sectors, the introduction of managerial tools and paradigms did not always provide the expected results. In many cases, during formulation and in the implementation stages, the peculiar organizational characteristics of the judicial sector were overlooked, opting for a standardized managerial approach, with the consequent lower results. Keywords: judiciary system, performance evaluation, information technology, New public management, justice quality.