Legal aid leads Europe

No comments

England and Wales has fewer courts per head of population than Belgium, Ireland or the Russian Federation, but spends at least four times more on legal aid than any other Council of Europe jurisdiction, an official survey reveals this week.

The Council’s European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice studied 45 of the 47 members of the organisation, set up in 1949 to protect human rights and the rule of law. It found that, in 2006, England and Wales’s £2.36bn spend on legal aid was around four times that of Germany. Malta’s budget was just £11,676.

The commission warns that comparing data from states with differing sizes, economies and judicial systems is difficult. The Russian Federation, with 143 million inhabitants from the Baltic to the Pacific, has three times as many professional judges per head of population as England and Wales.

Monaco, population 30,000, emerges as the state devoting the most of its public budget per inhabitant to its judicial system – £131. Moldova spends the least: £1.56. The figure for England and Wales is £77, trailing Germany (£83).

England and Wales is in the top tier for computerisation of courts, along with Denmark, Estonia and Slovakia. It lags far behind with alternative dispute resolution services, having 3.7 accredited mediators per 100,000 population, compared with Austria’s 42.3 and the Netherlands’ 24. All figures are for 2006.