Target groups

ERA works with all practitioners of law:

• Judges
• Prosecutors
• Lawyers in private practice
• Notaries
• In-house counsel and lawyers in business
• Law enforcement officers
• Lawyers in public administration.

Types of training activities developed

As the European Commission’s communication on judicial training of September 2011 explains, ERA “has extensive experience in successfully organising Union law seminars for multicultural audiences”. It offers conferences and courses at different levels at its centre in Trier (near the EU’s judicial capital in Luxembourg), in Brussels and around Europe:

• Annual conferences and forums to review and debate the latest developments
• Seminars focused on a specific development for practitioners to explore in detail
• Basic training courses as an introduction to a specific area of EU law
• Briefings in Brussels to analyse topical developments in EU law
• Legal language courses.

ERA also provides:

• E-learning courses and resources
• E-presentations featuring top experts on EU law
• A quarterly legal journal called ERA Forum.

ERA’s training programmes cover the full range of EU law:

• European public law, e.g. institutional law, fundamental rights, asylum and immigration, environmental law, taxation
• European private law, e.g. consumer protection, labour and social law, private international law, judicial co-operation in civil matters
• European business law, e.g. competition law, public procurement, intellectual property rights, company law, financial services
• European criminal law, e.g. judicial cooperation in criminal matters, police cooperation.

Activities 2015

In 2015 ERA organised 157 training events attended by 6903 legal practitioners from 54 countries. It also offered 7 e-learning courses and about 60 e-presentations.

Participants’ professional background was:

• Judges: 27%
• Prosecutors: 5%
• Lawyers in private practice: 24%
• In-house counsel: 5%
• Law enforcement officers: 1%
• EU officials: 7%
• Ministry officials: 6%
• Other civil servants: 9%
• Academics: 5%
• Foundation/NGO representatives: 4%
• Other: 6%

International partnerships/agreements

A founding member of the European Judicial Training Network (EJTN), ERA was re-elected to the EJTN Steering Committee in 2013 for the period 2014-2017. For the same period, ERA was elected Convenor of the Network's Working Group on Programmes and member of its Working Group on Technologies. It also has strong relationships with individual national judicial training institutions, with several of which it has framework agreements for the joint organisation of training activities for judges and prosecutors.

ERA also works regularly on a project-by-project basis with the Council of the Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), the Council of the Notariats of the European Union (CNUE), the European Company Lawyers Association (ECLA) as well as other lawyers’ organisations at European and national level.

As a public-benefit foundation, ERA is a member of the European Foundation Centre.

History

ERA was established in 1992 on the initiative of the European Parliament. The founding patrons were the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, the City of Trier and the Friends of ERA Association. In the intervening years, 25 of the 27 EU Member States, among others, have joined the foundation.

Contact details

E-mail: info@era.int

Number of staff: 74

Legal status: ERA is a non-profit public foundation.

Related link

ERA's website