The European Commission has approved a policy paper which sets goal of training 700,000 legal professionals in EU law by 2020. The objective is helping to build mutual trust between Europe's different legal systems and improve the implementation of European legislation. This will benefit people and businesses in Europe, who will be able to rely on swift decisions and proper respect for the rules.

A new policy paper has been approved by the Commission in order to ensure that half of all legal practitioners in the European Union, including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, notaries, bailiffs and court staff, around 700,000, participate in some form of European judicial training by 2020. The Commission wants to enable at least half of these legal practitioners to participate in European judicial training at local, national or European level by 2020. An additional target is to ensure that all legal practitioners benefit from at least one week's training in EU law during their career.

This proposal intends to build mutual trust between Europe's different legal systems and improve the implementation of European legislation and, according to the Commission, this will benefit people and businesses in Europe, who will be able to rely on swift decisions and proper respect for the rules. As Vice-President Viviane Reding, the EU's Justice Commissioner stated last June this will help cement their efforts to create an EU-wide area of justice, improving the way the internal market operates. She added that judicial training is central to a modern and well-functioning judiciary capable of reducing the higher risks and higher transactions costs that impede economic growth. European judicial training is therefore a much needed investment to develop justice for growth.

To achieve this, the European Commission has also called on national governments, councils for the judiciary, professional bodies and judicial training institutions both at EU and national level to commit to integrating EU law into their training programmes and to increasing the volume of courses and participants. Additionally, the Commission itself intends to facilitate access to EU funding to support high-quality training projects, including e-learning. Under the EU's new multi-annual financial framework, that is currently under discussion among the EU institutions, the Commission has proposed to make European judicial training a major priority, with the aim of training more than 20,000 legal practitioners a year by 2020.