Ljubljana: A citizen in the Slovenian capital waiting for a civil case to conclude cares less about grand constitutional debate than about whether the court will decide before the dispute stops mattering. The European Union’s latest measurement of that everyday reliability, the 2026 Justice Scoreboard, offers cautious encouragement alongside a stubborn warning. The annual justice scoreboard tracks how efficiently, independently and digitally the bloc’s courts actually work.
The Commission publishes the comparative exercise each year to give governments a mirror. It measures how long proceedings take, how far courts have digitalised their processes, and how citizens and companies perceive the independence of their judges. This year’s edition reports genuine progress on efficiency and on the accessibility of justice, the practical dimensions that shape whether people trust the system enough to use it.
Perceptions of independence held broadly steady. According to the scoreboard, citizens in seventeen member states and companies in eighteen see judicial independence as improved or stable compared with the previous year. That is a modest but real signal that the long campaign to shore up courts against political pressure has, in much of the Union, at least stopped losing ground.
The reassurance only stretches so far. Independent monitoring paints a harder picture than the official data. The Liberties Rule of Law Report for 2026 found meaningful progress in just two states, Latvia and Lithuania, while thirteen registered no advance and seven slipped backward, naming Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Slovakia and Spain among those regressing.
The unresolved battleground is who controls judges. Reformers keep returning to two levers that decide whether politics can bend judicial outcomes: the bodies that appoint judges and the arrangements that protect prosecutors from political direction. Where a governing majority can shape appointments, formal independence can hollow out even as the statutes stay intact.
Numbers underline the drift. Across the wider rule-of-law cycle, a large majority of the Commission’s earlier recommendations remain unimplemented, with several governments stagnating and a few actively dismantling the checks that constrain them. A scoreboard can diagnose the problem, but it cannot compel a reluctant capital to act, and that gap between measurement and enforcement is the Union’s persistent weakness.
For a smaller state such as Slovenia, the scoreboard functions as both benchmark and pressure. It lets a government show where its courts run faster and more openly than its neighbours, and it exposes where delay or opacity still corrodes confidence. Reputation, in a Union that trades on mutual recognition of legal judgments, carries weight that no fine can replicate.
The broader lesson is that efficiency and independence do not rise together by default. A court can clear its docket quickly and still bend to power, or guard its autonomy while drowning in backlog. The 2026 edition suggests Europe is winning the first fight in more places than the second, and that the harder, slower work of insulating judges from politics remains unfinished across too much of the continent.
