Background information:

EUROJUSTIS is a project designed to provide EU institutions and Member States with new evidence-based indicators for the assessment of public confidence in criminal justice and fear of crime. The project will develop and pilot survey-based indicators of public confidence in justice. The assumption is that there are close relationships between public perceptions of justice, fear of crime and the substantive quality of the justice process.

Accessible tools for presenting and interpreting the indicators will be developed. Besides developing scientifically credible indicators, building some consensus across Member States about the importance of assessing crime policy against criteria of public confidence is an important goal.

Four EUROJUSTIS partners (London School of Economics, King’s College London, University of Sheffield and HEUNI) together with the Dutch research institute NSCR, have submitted a successful proposal for a module of questions in the fifth sweep of the European Social Survey. The 50-question module is entitled ‘Trust in Justice'. The process of planning the survey questions is well under way. The piloting and fieldwork of the ESS will take place in 2010, and the dataset will be publicly available in 2011.

The project is co-funded by the EU-FP7 programme, under grant agreement nr 217311 and it was launched in March 2008 for duration of 3 years. The project is a joint initiative of seven countries (Bulgaria, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom). HEUNI’s main responsibility is to disseminate the results and progress of the project. In 2009, HEUNI co-edited a first publication of EUROJUSTIS project working papers. The publication is available here.

For more information:

www.eurojustis.eu

Anniina Jokinen
anniina.jokinen(at)om.fi

Elina Ruuskanen
elina.ruuskanen(at)om.fi