Last edition of the program in Iberdrola

This programme’s (of the Spanish, PEMJ) goals are, firstly, to promote mutual knowledge, awareness and the pooling of experience to help judges, magistrates and entrepreneurs to best perform their activities. Secondly, to provide judges and magistrates with real knowledge of business, its principles, organization, objectives, and ways of working, as well as its social, economic and technical concepts. Furthermore, the idea is to provide companies’ managers and leaders with an overview of the administration of justice, as well as the problems and complexities which magistrates and judges deal with in matters pertaining to the business sector.

In 1998, talks began with the French organization Entreprise et Progrès, a pioneer in this kind of initiative in France. Various meetings were held in subsequent years to learn about France’s background and experience in this area, as well as to study the possibility of designing a similar programme in Spain. The French initiative, developed in cooperation with l’Ecole Nationale de la Magistrature, has been hugely successful and shows that the programme was an excellent idea, as it has enabled judges to learn more about business and economic life, in particular.

In March 2001, Círculo de Empresarios participated in a series of meetings in Paris on “Entrepreneurs et Justice”, an excellent conference sponsored by the INSEAD, which reinforced Círculo de Empresarios’s conviction of the need to begin proceedings in Spain to launch the Judges and Magistrates Enterprise Program. Shortly afterwards meetings were held with Spain’s General Council of the Judiciary (Consejo General del Poder Judicial) to establish an institutional framework in which to develop the Judges and Magistrates Enterprise Program.

As a result of these contacts, this programme was launched in February 2002. Since then, the Council has included the Judges and Magistrates Enterprise Programme in its annual training plan and editions of the programme have been run at the following companies:

• 2002: IBM (7 participants)
• 2004: Telefónica (10 participants)
• 2005: Grupo Agbar (7 participants)
• 2006: Indra (6 participants)
• 2007: Vodafone (7 participants)
• 2008: Ferrovial (9 participants)
• 2009: La Caixa (10 participants)
• 2010: Iberdrola (9 participants)