Belgian Digital Justice: Let's Stop Pretending
On March 17, 2026, Larcier organized an evening dedicated to the digitalization of Belgian justice, under the leadership of Stanislas van Wassenhove, author of the reference white paper on the subject, whose new edition has just been published.
On the program: a state of play, observations, and a novelty compared to previous editions: the Court of Auditors report published in January 2025 on the digital transformation of justice. The Court of Auditors report is damning. After more than two decades of effort, budgets, and successive ambitions (from the failure of Phoenix in 2007 to the Van Quickenborne relaunch from 2020 onward), the Court of Auditors paints an unsparing picture: no coherent strategy, deficient governance, insufficient budgetary control, massive recourse to consultancy without conflict of interest controls, and an FPS Justice structurally incapable of assuming the basic administrative functions required by such a project.
Here are some reflections inspired by this evening, in my capacity as a lawyer sensitive to digital issues and committed to the rule of law.
1. What the European Data Tells Us
Before analyzing the causes, a detour through the numbers is necessary. The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) publishes a comparative evaluation of the judicial systems of 44 Council of Europe member states every two years. Its latest report (2024 cycle, 2022 data) allows us to situate Belgium with a precision that makes announcements difficult to maintain.
First observation: Belgium is not a country that underinvests in its justice system. In 2022, the executed budget of the judicial system reached 102.5 euros per inhabitant, above the European median of 74.8 euros. The delay can therefore hardly be explained by a lack of resources.
Second observation, which directly contradicts the first: the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) deployment index published by the CEPEJ places Belgium at 3.52/10, compared to a European median of 4.16.
The effective utilization rate of these tools drops to 2.81/10. Even more revealing, the “digital access to justice” indicator reaches 2.50/10, compared to a median of 3.4. In criminal matters, ICT deployment falls to 2.78/10 for a median of 4.1.
These figures are clear: Belgium spends more than its European neighbors on its justice system but achieves results below the median in terms of digitalization. The money arrives. It does not translate into results. This gap is precisely what the Court of Auditors documents in its January 2025 report: not a lack of resources, but a structural incapacity to mobilize them effectively.
The effects are also measured on the ground. The “disposition time” of supreme administrative courts reaches 589 days in Belgium, compared to a European median of 234 days. And the clearance rate of these same courts is 91%, below the 100% needed to stabilize the backlog: the latter therefore continues to grow mechanically.
It is this objective, comparative data, produced by an independent Council of Europe body, that constitutes the real backdrop of the debate.
2. Breaking the “Unique Judicial World” Narrative
During every exchange on this subject, the same reflex returns: the judicial world is supposedly a world apart, of such singular complexity that it would justify, in a certain way, the accumulated delay. I do not share this view at all, and I think it does more harm than good.
This narrative is not objective. Certainly, justice has particular obligations: guaranteeing the right to a fair trial, ensuring the independence of judges, protecting extremely sensitive data. But other highly regulated sectors, subject to confidentiality, traceability, and security requirements just as stringent, have managed to digitalize. I am not putting healthcare on the same level, but the banking sector, notaries, and the tax services themselves, which I will return to, offer examples of successful digital transformation in complex and regulated environments.
What is true, however, is that justice is not a secondary sector. It is one of the three fundamental pillars of any democratic society. This cannot therefore justify indulgence in the face of delay: it forbids it. If this sector deserves special treatment, it is precisely to devote the greatest efforts, the best competencies, and adequate resources to it.
3. Cybersecurity: An Argument to Put in Perspective
Another argument regularly comes up to explain, even excuse, the slowness of transformation. Judicial data is supposedly so sensitive, so “bloody” to use the phrase employed during the evening by a speaker from the judicial world, that cybersecurity requirements would make digitalization particularly perilous.
I understand the argument. I even partly share it. But it must be put in perspective with what is happening outside the courts.
The Belgian tax administration is engaged in an unprecedented digitalization. The extension of the Central Contact Point, the development of data warehouses intended for fiscal data mining, the constitution of a considerable patrimony of information on each individual’s financial situation: all of this is currently being built (in computer systems that we sincerely hope are robust).
If cybersecurity considerations constitute a brake on the digitalization of justice, they have not prevented the tax administration from advancing at a rapid pace. The coordination of efforts within the various ministries should allow lessons to be drawn and solutions to be pooled, rather than invoking cybersecurity as an argument to defer action.
4. Standardization First, Automation Second
A methodological point that seems fundamental to me and that was insufficiently highlighted: there will never be automation without prior standardization.
This is a classic path in any digital transformation. Current ambitions are legitimate. However, they can only materialize if processes are first standardized, if data is structured uniformly, if practices converge.
This is foundational work, unspectacular, but nonetheless essential. The absence of this preliminary step largely explains the successive failures over twenty-five years.
5. Change Management Cannot Be Decreed from Above
The digitalization of justice has often been conceived as a political project driven from the top.
The results speak for themselves. During the evening, Fabienne Bayard formulated an observation that seems both fair and necessary to me: software providers, presented as “innovation partners,” have too often imposed their pre-existing solutions on judicial actors without taking the trouble to consult the field beforehand. The public contracts concluded in this framework raise serious questions.
The approach must be reversed. It is a bottom-up approach that enables the change management everyone hopes for: mobilizing field actors so they contribute to building solutions, rather than imposing upon them a transformation designed without them. Clerks, judges, lawyers: they are the ones who know what they need. Listening to them is not a concession: it is a condition for success and an indispensable buy-in for this ambitious work.
6. Governance: A Void That Suits Everyone
The Court of Auditors insists at length on governance problems. One might naively be surprised: does not each actor have clearly defined missions and responsibilities? In reality, this void is not an accident. It is the reflection of a situation where the lack of clarity in roles allows everyone to avoid accountability.
The evening of March 17 illustrated this in a striking manner: all justice actors were present, all pointed to the same dysfunctions, all named the same responsible parties. The only one absent was precisely the one everyone cited: the Minister of Justice and the FPS Justice.
This absence confirms a tendency observed too often in our political system: the inability to carry structural reforms beyond a legislative term, the race for quick and visible victories at the expense of fundamental transformations, the lack of continuity in decisions.
7. Shared Responsibility: Everyone Must Play Their Part
Behind the observation of deficient governance lies a more uncomfortable reality: the digital transformation of justice is a collective failure that calls for an equally collective commitment to overcome. Pointing solely to the responsibility of the FPS Justice or the minister is a convenient but insufficient response.
Judges, clerks, lawyers, and technology providers each bear their own share of responsibility. The lawyer who refuses out of habit to use available digital tools, the provider who imposes preformatted solutions without listening to field actors, the professional who passively waits for things to move at another level: all contribute, in their own way, to the blockage. The way out of the crisis requires each actor to accept their own margin of action. This does not mean absolving those who bear formal responsibility for steering – it remains full – but it does mean that no one can content themselves with waiting for others to move first.
8. A Door Left Ajar by the Constitutional Court
It is in this context that ruling no. 149/2025 of the Constitutional Court, rendered on November 13, 2025, takes on its full significance. Anne-Sophie Lemaire, who is completing her doctorate on the digitalization of justice and preparing an article on the subject, drew the assembly’s attention to this ruling during the evening, and I believe she is right to do so.
The Court was seized with actions for annulment of the law of May 15, 2024 containing provisions on the digitalization of justice. It annulled Article 725bis/1, paragraph 3, of the Judicial Code – the provision that entrusts the management of the Central Register of Procedural Files to the joint management committee referred to in Article 42 of the law of February 18, 2014 on the autonomous management of the judiciary. Reason: the current composition of this committee does not guarantee that representatives of the judicial order can effectively oppose developments that would affect the independence or confidence in the preservation of data. The Court sees in this a violation of Articles 10, 11, and 13 of the Constitution, read in conjunction with Articles 40 and 151 and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
What this ruling says, fundamentally, is that the digitalization of justice is not a purely technical or administrative matter. It directly touches upon the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. Who controls the digital procedural files? The answer cannot be: the executive branch.
Litigants have the right to be certain that their case will be handled without outside interference, and this also applies to the infrastructure that stores the documents in their file.
The ruling therefore obliges the legislature to review the governance of the Central Register of Procedural Files. This is a constraint, but it is also an opportunity. It forces the clear posing of the question that has been dodged for too long: who decides, who is responsible, and with what guarantees for the independence of the judicial power? Questions that were asked dozens of times during the evening of March 17, 2026, incidentally.
Twenty-five years after the launch of Phoenix, Belgium remains in the bottom third of the European ranking. This is not a fatality. It is the result of non-choices. The Court of Auditors has done its job. Field actors have demonstrated their capacity to organize and reflect collectively, as evidenced by the quality of the exchanges on March 17 and the progress already made. Apparently little is missing to succeed in this ambitious and necessary project.
Belgian digital justice is possible, and we are at an interesting moment to conclude the endeavor with the goodwill that is still present. Let us dare to change!
An opinion piece was also published on the La Libre Belgique website: Digital justice: lots of money, few results – here are the 5 measures to take.
This note was written with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence (Claude, Anthropic). The analyses, positions, and editorial choices are my own.