CORDIS · JUST-IN
JUSTICE-IN-CONTEXT (JUST-IN): SOCIAL PRACTICES, LOCAL REALITIES, AND THE EVERYDAY WORK OF JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN EUROPE
- Code
JUST-IN- Programme
- HORIZON
- Call
HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-DEMOCRACY-11- Status
- SIGNED
- Period
- 2026-10-01 – 2029-09-30
Official data · CORDIS · synced 2026-10-17 10:16 · official record
Participants
| Organisations | Role | Country | Grant |
|---|---|---|---|
| UNIVERSITAET BREMEN | coordinator | DE | 338 250 € |
| UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT | participant | NL | 300 250 € |
| CSI CENTER FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION LTD | participant | CY | 290 031 € |
| FUNDACION CENTRO TECNOLOXICO DE TELECOMUNICACIONS DE GALICIA | participant | ES | 274 062 € |
| KENTRO DIETHNOUS KAI EUROPAIKOU OIKONOMIKOU DIKAIOU | participant | EL | 256 188 € |
| TILBURG UNIVERSITY- UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG | participant | NL | 236 172 € |
| EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE | participant | IT | 233 550 € |
| UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI TORINO | participant | IT | 232 034 € |
| UNIVERSITE PARIS XII VAL DE MARNE | participant | FR | 229 000 € |
| OXYGONO | participant | CY | 223 688 € |
| INSTITUTE OF COMPARATIVE LAW | participant | RS | 175 156 € |
| INSTITUT FUR FINANZDIENSTLEISTUNG EV IFF | participant | DE | 163 312 € |
| UNIWERSYTET GDANSKI | participant | PL | 160 312 € |
| Association de recherche sur l'administration de la justice - Jar Association | participant | FR | 142 188 € |
| FONDATSIYA LIBRE | participant | BG | 124 062 € |
Description
JUST-IN addresses one of the most pressing challenges facing the European Union: the erosion of judicial independence and the rule of law from within Member States. While existing EU mechanisms, such as the Justice Scoreboard and the Rule of Law Reports, provide important monitoring tools, they remain largely top-down, focusing on formal safeguards and institutional indicators. This approach fails to capture the everyday practices, informal networks, and cultural meanings that shape how judicial independence operates in practice. JUST-IN departs from this narrow perspective by embedding judicial independence in its lived institutional, organisational, and cultural contexts. It advances a bottom-up methodology that integrates local meanings, informal practices, and participatory insights into European monitoring efforts, ensuring that rule of law indicators reflect not only law in books but also law in action. Combining doctrinal analysis, socio-legal research, political science, and data science, the project employs a mixed-method design. Citizens’ Observatories of Judicial Independence will gather grassroots perspectives from judges, clerks, lawyers, civil society, and court users, complementing systematic coding and analysis of national case law with AI-assisted qualitative data methods. Particular attention will be paid to contemporary challenges such as judicial managerialism and the integration of artificial intelligence in courts, both of which reshape workloads, case allocation, and reasoning patterns, often in ways that risk undermining independence. Findings will feed into the Embedded Judicial Independence Tracker (EJIT), an innovative online platform providing reliable, multilingual, and up-to-date data that complements EU-level monitoring instruments. In parallel, the project will pioneer a cross-citation support tool, fostering judicial cooperation through transnational referencing while respecting national diversity.
Official data · CORDIS · synced 2026-10-17 10:16 · official record · Licence: © European Union, CC BY 4.0 (Commission reuse policy).