Dr Nicolas Kyriakides Participates in the JUST-IN Kick-off Meeting in Bremen

Dr Nicolas Kyriakides, Director of the Procedural Law Unit at the University of Nicosia, participated in the kick-off meeting of the Horizon Europe research project JUST-IN, hosted by the University of Bremen on 8–9 October 2026. Attending in his capacity as Vice President of Oxygen for Democracy, he presented the organisation’s leadership of Work Package 6 and its role in developing pilot Citizens’ Observatories of Judicial Independence.

JUST-IN — Justice-in-Context: Social Practices, Local Realities, and the Everyday Work of Judicial Independence in Europe — is a three-year project examining how judicial independence operates in practice across different European settings. Alongside formal legal guarantees and institutional structures, it investigates the everyday practices, organisational conditions, informal relationships and cultural understandings that shape the work of courts.

The project combines legal analysis, socio-legal research, political science and data science with participatory methods. It seeks to complement existing European monitoring mechanisms by incorporating the experiences of judges, court staff, lawyers, civil society and court users. Particular attention is given to court management and the growing use of artificial intelligence in justice systems, including their implications for judicial autonomy, workloads, case allocation and judicial reasoning.

Planned outputs include the Embedded Judicial Independence Tracker (EJIT), an online platform bringing together multilingual evidence on judicial independence, and a cross-citation support tool intended to facilitate engagement with judicial decisions across jurisdictions.

Within this framework, Oxygen for Democracy leads Work Package 6, which will develop pilot Citizens’ Observatories of Judicial Independence in Cyprus, Greece, Germany and Serbia. The Observatories will provide spaces for structured participation and dialogue, connecting local experiences with the project’s wider research and policy recommendations.

Dr Kyriakides’ presentation outlined the purpose and design of the Observatories, addressing participant recruitment, governance, safeguards and coordination with the consortium. It also highlighted the operational questions and support needed from partners to prepare their implementation.

The two-day meeting brought consortium members together to discuss the project’s scientific foundations, research methods, ethical and data management arrangements, digital tools and implementation priorities. It marked the beginning of a collaborative effort to develop a more context-sensitive understanding of judicial independence and its relationship with the rule of law in Europe.