Viviane Reding is a bit of a favourite among UK ministers. The European Commissioner for Justice has a knack of making such a good case for reform of Europe with her interviews and policies that Conservatives – and indeed Ukippers – are quite content for her to intervene as often as possible. This week, she’s got another cunning plan that eloquently makes the case for reform of Europe – and ministers will be standing up to her again.
Reding is expected to publish the second annual EU Justice Scoreboard on Monday: it’s a league table of all the EU member states’ justice systems. At first glance, this sounds like a nice idea: compare the independence and efficiency of different justice systems to encourage under performing countries to improve. But it has an ulterior motive: to create a uniform EU justice system across all member states (more on that here), and because Justice Secretary Chris Grayling is rather suspicious of this motive, to put it mildly, he continued to refuse to provide any data or co-operate with the Scoreboard process at all in its second year.
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