Examination of Witnesses (Questions 55-59)
Mr Onno Brouwer and Mr Georg Berrisch
29 NOVEMBER 2006
Q55Chairman: Good afternoon, gentlemen, and
welcome to Sub-Committee E. We are very grateful to you for coming
and assisting us in this inquiry which, I think you know, we embarked
on last week and you are the second group, so to speak, of witnesses
we are going to hear. I do not know if either of you has ever
given evidence on one of these committees before, but it is on
air, it is recorded, you get a copy of the transcript, published
initially uncorrected, but then you get an opportunity to correct
it and please feel free to do that or indeed to tell us anything
more you think we would be interested to hear. I do not know whether
you have a prepared opening, but we would certainly like one or
other of you to give us a thumbnail sketch of the essential basis
of CCBE, how it operates and what its particular contribution
to this is.
Mr Brouwer: My Lord Chairman, within the CCBE
which, as you know, represents the national bars at the Community
level, we have the permanent delegation to the EU courts. We have
regular discussions with the EU courts on judicial architecture,
on the procedures which operate before the Court of First Instance
and also the Court of Justice and we tend to have an annual meeting
with the courts to discuss a number of issues which are topical
and which are of interest to the bar and to the EU courts. Of
course judicial architecture is an important topic and the CCBE
and the permanent delegation of the CCBE tends very much to look
at the procedures from the perspective of the customers of the
courts, which means the European citizen. We pay a lot of attention
to issues like access to justice and due process, but what we
also find very important is efficiency of procedures because at
the end of the day it is of course an element of effective judicial
protection, that procedures are efficient.
Q56 Chairman: Perhaps I can put it this
way: are you the interface between the legal profession which
uses the Court and the Court itself so you act like a users' committee?
Is that basically it?
Mr Brouwer: Yes, my Lord Chairman, I think that
is it.
Q57 Chairman: I know you are the President
of the permanent delegation and you have this annual meeting,
you tell us, but how much of your time is devoted to this? You
are a partner in Freshfields and that is presumably the bulk of
your work.
Mr Brouwer: Fortunately we have people within
the committee who are all specialised, so the members of the committee
are lawyers who tend to regularly appear before the courts.
Q58 Chairman: In the different areas
of the courts' work?
Mr Brouwer: No. I think some of us do a lot
of competition work and others do also other strains of Community
law, like myself, I cover a broad range and my colleague, Mr Berrisch,
too. We meet a number of times a year. It is four to six times
that the permanent delegation actually meets in Brussels and we
have obviously topics on the agenda which we prepare and we discuss
also outside these meetings by other means in order to express
views. We also often give views in the form of papers which we
publish and which are also put on the website of the CCBE, for
instance, on the Maastricht Treaty and whether the Treaty should
be changed to have better access to justice and so on, so we take
a position on quite a number of issues.
Q59 Chairman: Do you think it is a good
idea that we have embarked on this inquiry?
Mr Brouwer: We think it is an excellent idea.
| 
