Is justice in Luxembourg too slow? The data says: wrong question

Everyone in Luxembourg legal practice holds the same opinion: justice is too slow. It is held with complete confidence and, until recently, with no way of checking it. So I built one. Our Justice Performance Observatory turns the official sources, LUSTAT, and the EU Justice Scoreboard, into indicators anyone can interrogate. Running the profession's favourite opinion through it teaches four things worth knowing.

1. The arithmetic of a queue is unforgiving.

In 2024 the Court of Appeal (civil and commercial) received 1,217 cases and completed 1,154. That means a clearance rate of 94.8 per cent: for every hundred cases arriving, ninety-five remain. The difference sounds trivial. It is not. Any rate below 100 means the pending stock grows every single year, mechanically, regardless of the effort inside the building. Pending rose to 1,667 cases, up 63 on the year. A court can be working flat out and still losing ground; the two facts coexist quite comfortably, and one picture shows both at once.

The trend shows the same story, but in slow motion. The court cleared more than it received for most of the 2015 to 2022 period; since 2023 it has slipped under the line, and the backlog has resumed growing.

2. The number everyone quotes is not the number they think it is.

The observatory estimates the disposition time at 527 days. Before that figure hardens into "cases take a year and a half," it helps to know what it measures: pending stock divided by yearly throughput. It answers the question "at the current pace, how long would the shelf take to empty", which is a statement about the queue, not about any litigant's experience. The figure everyone actually wants, how long real cases took from filing to judgement, turns out to be published nowhere. The observatory has a column for it. That column reads "not available" for every chamber for eleven consecutive years. We have been debating the speed of justice without ever measuring it.

3. Averages are where the revealing facts go to hide.

Break the aggregate open and "too slow" stops being one opinion and becomes a map. Chamber I (family and civil matters) runs at an estimated 288 days. The labour chamber cleared 142 per cent of its 2024 intake and cut its backlog by more than a fifth. Juvenile protection resolves its cases in 19 days. And Chamber IX, civil and commercial, stands at an estimated 1,087 days with a clearance rate of 74.6 per cent.

The system is not uniformly slow; specific lists are slow, others are fast and improving, and the useful policy question is why one chamber's docket behaves so differently from its neighbours'. That question cannot even be asked at the aggregate level.

4. Comparison is a tool, not a verdict.

The EU Justice Scoreboard 2026 estimates Luxembourg's first-instance disposition time for non-criminal cases at 233 days against an EU median of 104: slower than the Netherlands at 80, faster than France at 341.

Tempting as a league table, and wrong as one: case mix, procedural rules and reporting definitions differ, and the CEPEJ, which collects the data, says expressly that it is an overview, not a ranking. What the comparison legitimately supports is narrower and more useful: Luxembourg sits well above the median, and the gap is worth explaining rather than merely deploring.

The general lesson is the method. A strong opinion about a public institution is rarely wrong; it is under-specified. Open data does not settle the argument so much as upgrade it: "too slow" becomes "slow where, for whom, measured how", and each version of the question has either an answer or a documented absence of one. The absences may be the most important findings on the whole dashboard. Every figure above is public, sourced, and downloadable; the opinions you draw from it will be your own.

A note on the sources: figures retrieved from the Justice Performance Observatory (luxjustice.pplx.app) on 20 August 2026, drawing on LUSTAT (reporting year 2024), data.public.lu and the EU Justice Scoreboard 2026. Estimated disposition time is a stock-flow indicator, not observed case duration. The observatory is not an official publication of the Luxembourg judiciary.