For the first time, the European Commission has set aside financial support exclusively for judicial training activities. All organisations envisaging to implement European judicial training activities together with partners from at least one other EU Member State are invited to compete with their proposals for financial support of 5 million € in total. They will have time until mid November to draft high-quality projects on training legal practitioners in EU law or law of other EU member states, developing training material or other activities helpful to implement judicial training in the European Union and get into contact with similarly minded partners from other EU Member States. Applicants may be inspired by the results of a workshop that presented good practices of European judicial training in June 2014 in Brussels. The award criteria have become more flexible, since apart from concentrating on funding priorities fixed by the European Commission it is also possible to gain points for the award decision by demonstrating that the project is tackling further training needs of the legal practice. In order to lower the bureaucratic burden, in certain cases lump sums have been introduced. Funding smaller training projects has become easier, since the minimum amount of the financial support (a percentage of the project budget) has been lowered.
