I suspect that you’ve been waiting all year for the anniversary which comes around on 25th October: the European Day of Justice. You are planning to dress up in lawyers’ robes, and dance in the streets.

I celebrated it early with an unsung heroine of our profession, Diana Wallis MEP, an English solicitor (and vice-president of the parliament), who struggles to reconcile the various European Union legal traditions into workable solutions, as a frequent parliamentary reporter for the Legal Affairs Committee. She brought together leading justice policy-makers at EU level to share views over a working dinner.

Before you go and practise your dance steps, let me deal with the day’s serious aspects. First, the name: it appears to have at least two. On the European Commission website, it is called the European Day of Civil Justice, but on the Council of Europe website - and I trust that you are absolutely clear about the difference between the two - it is just the plain old European Day of Justice. Sometimes the Council of Europe calls it the European Day for Justice. A whole essay could be written about whether the celebrations should take a different form depending on whether it is ‘of Justice’ or ‘for Justice’ i.e. celebrating what we already have (‘of’), or pushing for something more (‘for’). I assume in this case that the name has fallen foul of the most difficult aspect of translation from another language: the preposition.

I have investigated the history, which fortunately does not go back into the mists of time, and so does not require archaeological skills or visits to distant libraries. The idea was first mooted at a conference in Brussels in 2002, and approved, in European terms, at a speed faster than light. By the middle of 2003, the Council of Europe had approved it, and the Commission had said that it would celebrate the date jointly with it. Voilà!

The aim was that events should be organised all over Europe in order to bring justice closer to citizens and enable citizens to understand better how justice works, and therefore improve their access to justice. That is laudable. The original declaration went further and said that it was generally recognised that European citizens were informed inadequately about their rights, and even worse on how civil justice works. Civil law generally does not appear in the teaching programmes of schools. In other words, they were hoping to promote around Europe the kind of activity that the Citizenship Foundation and Lawyers in Schools perform in the UK.

You might think that the mention of civil law in the original aims clinches the matter about the name. But you would be wrong. The founders wanted a symbolic aspect of the day, and this has been provided by the award of an annual prize since 2005: the Crystal Scales of Justice award. It is awarded to the winner of 'a competition to discover and highlight innovative and efficient practices used in European courts for court organisation or for the conduct of judicial proceedings... so as to improve the functioning of the public justice system'. For a number of years, the prize alternated between the civil and criminal justice fields - criminal (2009) or civil justice (2005, 2006 and 2008).

A scrupulous analyst would conclude that it is more of a civil than a criminal justice day. But in 2010, the prize for the first time was open to both civil and criminal justice applicants. I feel the tension rising. What about 2011? Well, the competition is not being run this year, and so no clue there.

A list of the events being held in 2011 shows that UK citizens lose out. Only 10 countries have recorded events taking place, and so unless you want to organise something quickly - and the UK has a good track record, as evidenced by the two organisations I named above - you will have to travel to France (the nearest) or Armenia (the furthest) to find a flavour of citizens’ spontaneous celebrations in favour of justice.

I have made fun, but I wish the European Day of Justice - whatever its correct name - were better known and more widely celebrated. We moan about the misconceptions under which we work as lawyers, and here is a small opportunity to correct at least some of them.

Now raise your glass and we’ll toast justice in the 22 official languages - Cheers! Slainte! Prost! A votre santé! Salud! Cin cin! Skål!... and so on.