LATEST ON EURO-JUSTIS
Work packages 3 and 4 have now been completed. A new deliverable on the conceptualisation of new and improved indicators of public confidence in justice has been released. This deliverable is a short synthesis report, designed for politicians and officials. A deliverable on the sets of batteries of new survey questions has also been completed. Both of these documents can be downloaded from the EURO-JUSTIS website under Documents.
Work package 5 which involves collecting country-based contextual data on legal, criminological and sociological matters relevant to the project from more than 30 European countries is well under way. It has been decided that this data collection will continue until the end of the project with the aim of creating a database which will be useful to other researchers and projects as well.
Work package 6 is also underway. This WP is led by London School of Economics and it includes piloting the EURO-JUSTIS survey questions, interpreting the results and integrating them with the contextual data collected in WP5. Moreover, overall indicators that measure people’s confidence in the criminal justice system will be developed in work package 6. The fieldwork will be carried out over the summer of 2010.
The second international EURO-JUSTIS conference is discussed in more detail below. It was hosted by the University of Parma in Parma, Italy on 6-7 May 2010. The purpose of the conference was to present the work carried out in the project this far and to have invitees present their work on issues of trust in justice and legitimacy of the criminal justice system.
More details are presented below on the ‘trust in justice’ module of the European Social Survey questionnaire. This has been finalised, after piloting in Bulgaria and the UK. The questionnaire is currently being translated and the fieldwork will start in September 2010.
PARMA CONFERENCE
The second international EURO-JUSTIS conference was hosted by the University of Parma in Parma, Italy on 6-7 May 2010. The purpose of the conference was to present the work carried out in the project this far and to have invitees present their work on issues of trust in justice and legitimacy of the criminal justice system. The EURO-JUSTIS External Expert Group (EEG) had a closed meeting where the work and deliverables of WP3 were approved and validated.
Invitees to the conference included EU officers, External Expert Group members, FP5 and FP7 project members, and prominent criminologists and specialists in the field of trust in justice. The speakers included Tom Tyler from New York University, Mike Hough from King’s College London, Manuela Alfe from the European Commission, Jonathan Jackson from London School of Economics, Philippe Robert from CESDIP, Camilla Priede from the University of Sheffield, Stefano Maffei from the University of Parma, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä from the National Research Institute of Legal Policy, Finland, Geert Vervaeke from the European Network of Councils of Judiciary, François Paychère from the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, Renée Zauberman from CESDIP, Thordis Ingadottir from Reykjavik University, and Angelos Giannakopoulos from the University of Konstanz, Germany. In addition to the presentations, greetings were given by R. Piscopo, President of the Tribunale di Parma, U. Angeloni from the Italian Ministry of Interior and G. Gallo from the Italian State Police. All in all, more than 50 people attended the conference.
The presentations of the conference raised many interesting and fruitful discussions. We were very happy to welcome Tom Tyler at the conference since his ideas about procedural justice are of fundamental importance to the EURO-JUSTIS project. He expressed his interest in the results of the project which will show whether the concepts and ideas of procedural justice can be applied in a European context.
The conference programme and presentations are available here.
EUROPEAN SOCIAL SURVEY
The European Social Survey questions were piloted in Bulgaria and the UK, and based on interviewer debriefings and scaling of the pilot survey data, the questionnaire was finalised. The completed trust in justice module contains 45 questions on people’s attitudes about the police, the courts and punitivity. The module is currently being translated to the languages of the 30 countries where the ESS is fielded, and the fieldwork will start in September 2010. The dataset will be available for analysis in September 2011, and should be a unique resource in researching issues of public trust and perceptions of legitimacy across Europe. We hope that this will turn out to be a landmark study in comparative European research in this field. We are also optimistic that we shall be able to work in partnership with various countries outside of Europe in mounting surveys which replicate our ‘trust in justice’ module.
CURRENT AND FUTURE ACTIVITIES
The results of the EURO-JUSTIS project have been presented both in international conferences and published in journal articles:
Jonathan Jackson, Mike Hough and Stephen Farrall gave a paper “Trust in justice and the legitimacy of legal authorities: Pilot data from a major study of European public opinion” at the American Association of Public Opinion Research in Chicago, US in May 2010.
Mike Hough has given presentations on EURO-JUSTIS this spring at the European Commission (Brussels), the Royal Statistical Society (Belfast), the Academy of Social Science, Home Office and Ministry of Justice and King’s College (all these in London).
Monica M. Gerber, Helmut Hirtenlehner and Jonathan Jackson (2010): Insecurities about crime in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: A review of research findings. European Journal of Criminology 7 (2): 141–157.
Camilla Priede, Elina Ruuskanen, Anniina Jokinen and Stephen Farrall (2010): Analysing Cognitive Interview Data to Improve Cross-National Survey Questions. Social Research Update 59. http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/
The next and last EURO-JUSTIS conference will be held in London, UK in early 2011. This public event will be the largest conference of the project. More information about the conference will be available in the project website (www.eurojustis.eu) and in EURO-JUSTIS newsletters later on.
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