Towards a European Platform for Judicial Auctions: Where Do We Stand?

‘LEILA – towards a muLtilingual European platform for judIciaL Auctions’ (LEILA) Project is an EU-funded project aiming to pilot a multilingual platform for searching goods to be sold in judicial auctions taking place in the EU (‘the Platform’). It run for 2+ years and is now at its end. The main outcome of the project, being the Platform, is now officially launched following the project’s final public event. The big question for the judicial auctions’ domain now is: where do we stand?

The European Platform for Judicial Auctions follows the one-stop-shop approach to allow users for simultaneous data search in all connected national platforms for judicial auctions by means of predefined set of data elements. The user can filter by auction and asset, with the search granularity being proportionate to the volume of estimated responses.

Auctions can be searched by modality (electronic, in person, hybrid) and location (if in person), date and time, deposit and currency, and deadline to participate.

Assets can be searched by type (movable, immovable), category (e.g., buildings, land, etc.) profile (e.g., residential, commercial, etc.), location, and price range.

All cross-country results are presented in a uniform and commonly interpretable way in the form of lists, in a predefined number of European languages, and on the EU map.

To reach this point, the project first focused on defining the requirements to provide information on auctioned goods to interested parties and facilitate the search of judicial auctions online. By mapping stakeholders and gathering data on the legal, organizational, and technological aspects of judicial auctions at national level, LEILA sought to ensure that the Platform was to be designed and experimented with within the project in alignment with the needs of the stakeholders towards fostering the accessibility of judicial auctions throughout Europe. The outcomes of these studies are available here and summarized in a dedicated policy brief.

From a purely technical point of view, LEILA infrastructure uses e-CODEX, the EU’s secure cross-border transport infrastructure, for transferring information about judicial auctions cross-border. e-CODEX ensures reliable transmission of messages and documents and supports secure communication between citizens, companies, and judicial authorities. LEILA is, in fact, the first collaborative effort using e-CODEX in a domain which is not procedurally regulated for EU cross-border cases (unlike all other use cases under the e-CODEX umbrella). The basic e-CODEX infrastructure consists of a Gateway conforming to standards like AS-4 and eBMS 3.0, with the Domibus Gateway being the suggested option. A connector like the e-CODEX Domibus Connector enhances functionalities and security for communication between stakeholders.

As of November 2023, the European Platform for Judicial Auctions integrates information from the national platforms of Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania. It is expected for Portugal to connect in the beginning of 2024.

In order for a new Member State to join the Platform, three use cases have been developed by the project to serve the various scenarios on national level:

The first scenario is when a Member State already has a national platform for online auctions. In this case, the respective national project team should assess the compatibility of the national platform with the technical and operational requirements of the European Platform for Judicial Auctions, and initiate a national project on integrating with it, in case of a positive assessment. This is the experience shared by Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia and Lithuania so far.

If the Member State does not have a national platform on judicial auctions, the respective national project team could make use of a standalone portal solution called Mini-LEILA that is developed under the LEILA Project. Mini-LEILA can be installed and configured to meet the needs of that state including for integration purposes with the European Platform for Judicial Auctions. This is the experience of France.

If the Member State has several platforms, Mini-LEILA is complemented by an application programming interface (API) that enables all existing auction platforms to connect to it and participate in European Platform for Judicial Auctions simultaneously. While the IT tools are in place, no real-life experience could be shared as only few Member States fall under this scenario and none of them partners with the project.

Each of these scenarios have been developed in terms of IT tools and documentation and publicly shared on the project website.

While the number of Member States with national platforms on judicial auctions has increased since 2021 (ref. ‘European Platform for Judicial Auctions in the Making’, dated 7 September 2021), only few have expressed interest to join the European Platform for Judicial Auctions. During the LEILA Final Conference it became obvious that despite the willingness to keep the services alive, a follow-up project is necessary:

(a) to secure the maintenance of the LEILA ecosystem, introducing changes and optimising the Platform with new high-priority functionalities (in this regard, the topics of automated translation, providing information on Member States’ rules on judicial auctions, and building further services towards the national platforms were mentioned); and

(b) to enlarge the participation of national platforms to increase the Platform’s value from a Pan-European user base.

While harmonisation of national platforms’ features is presently not in scope of EU policy, there is also an obvious room for improving user experience (i.e., via an eIDAS-based identification service to enable participation in cross-border auctions, or via common core templates for user communication, based on a common terminology and concepts, etc.).

There is an open call from the LEILA Consortium to national competent authorities and professional organizations not yet involved in the project to get in touch and establish a joint partnership for all these improvements. However, only time will show whether the judicial auction domain is ready to move forward on a voluntary basis.

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Bulgaria is one of the Member States to introduce a national platform on judicial auction during the LEILA lifetime. As indicated before, the development of the platform took longer than expected with 6+ years of delay. The Bulgarian platform for electronic judicial auctions has been in operation since 20 July 2023. However, there is not yet publicly available information and/or statistics on the usage of the platform.

While this is quite a significant improvement on national level, one can only hope the next step will follow shortly towards Bulgaria joining the European Platform for Judicial Auctions. This will open the doors for both Bulgarian citizens and business to faster pay off of current outstanding debts.

The author is a member of the LIBRe Foundation Team working on the LEILA Project. The content of this article represents the views of the author and is their sole responsibility. Neither the European Commission nor the LEILA Consortium accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.