The Civil and Mercantile European Judicial Network was created by the EU Council Decision of 28th of May of 2001 (DOCE 27.06.01) as an essential tool to develop a space of freedom, safety and justice.
Its general aims are:

• Facilitating judicial cooperation related to civil and mercantile issues.
• Conceiving a program for public information.

Therefore, its activities are focused in:

• Speeding up the requests of international judicial cooperation related to issues of cross-border importance.
• Guaranteeing the effective application of the adopted community laws related to civil and mercantile judicial cooperation.
• Creating a public and open system related to the civil and mercantile judicial cooperation.

The members of the Network are classified in four groups:

a) Contact persons: In Spain there are two in the Ministry of Justice and two in the General Council of the Judiciary.

b) Central authorities.

c) Liaison magistrates.

d) Other authorities: In Spain all the members of the REJUE Civil Division are members.

In Spain, the contact points of the Network are located in the Ministry of Justice and in the General Council of the Judiciary. The magistrates integrated in the Spanish Judicial Network of International Judicial Cooperation (Civil Division) also bear the condition of members of the Civil and Mercantile European Judicial Network, thus facilitating the contact with their equivalent in other countries of the Network to perform their activities.

The Network has designed a website full of information, including datasheets in the different languages of the EU related to essential features of the civil jurisdiction in each Member State, with an easy and understandable language, so long as accurate, to help citizens’ confidence in case they have to file a case in a State different of their own.

Together with this website, another one has been designed by the Civil and Mercantile European Judicial Network, under the name of European Judicial Atlas. It is a basic tool to apply the civil cooperation tools which establish a direct communication among Courts without using the channel of central authorities. In this website, apart from detailing the contents of the different existing tools related to the civil judicial cooperation in the European Union, a clear location map of each civil court in Europe is included, with all the applicable models pursuant to the ruling used in each case.

The network celebrates meetings of two levels:  

a) Of the contact persons: At least once each semester; apart of analysing issues related to the Network functioning, the different existing ruling tools, related to civil international judicial cooperation are analysed in detail to understand the difficulties that are generated in the application thereof, providing the most suitable solutions that then the contact persons are in charge of passing on to the courts of their countries.

b) General Assembly: All the members of the Network meet together and it happens every year. Its content is similar to the above mentioned meetings, although with a more global vision. The place of celebration of the meeting in December 2004 was Madrid (specifically, in the headquarters of the General Council of the Judiciary).