Judging the Sustainability and Being Accountable - Different Approaches and Perspectives on ESG Reporting for Judicial Offices

Over the past few decades, sustainability has become a critical concern for all organizations: nowadays, no one could step aside from a global task of being more responsible and accountable on this issue.

European lawmakers have been introducing enforceable rules to strengthen the mandatory accountability and regulate the reporting requirements on ESG matters. The introduction of a new set of European standards that are tuned on the various sizes of organizations may lead to an unambiguous, easy-to-compare framework of sustainability reporting.

Although ESG reporting is typically associated with the corporate world, public sector institutions are recognizing the importance of managing this issue and demonstrate their commitment towards sustainability. For this reason, this research aims to explore the bounds of European normative.

This challenge is even more important for the Judicial Offices, that are increasingly called to judge cases of misleading advertising and false statements on ESG topics. Although some Courts and Prosecutor's Offices occasionally released documents labeled as “Social Responsibility Report”, often the main concern of these reports is the judiciary efficiency far more than the actual impact on the environment, workers, local communities and other stakeholders.

The raise of internal awareness and external expectations on the ESG accountability could possibly come into conflict with the predominant organizational culture and the established practices in Courts. Starting from several case studies current situation in several European countries and a specific survey, our work aims to explore current approaches and future perspectives on this topic, with a focus on the consistency between choices made by a sample of Judicial Offices and the European ESG reporting framework.