Public Sector White Paper

E-Justice in Central Eastern EuropeHow technology can help the different domains of justice

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Justice services in Central Eastern Europe have accomplished a good part of the journey and we are now in a period of opportunity to step change how the justice system operates, improve the case throughput, access to justice and improve citizen confidence.

What is the current state of justice in Central Eastern EuropeAfter the fall of the Berlin wall the Central and Eastern Europe countries faced a high priority challenge to transform and standardize their judicial systems. Significant changes in legislation were required, especially in the domain of civil and commercial law. Reforms entailed restoration of independence of the judiciary, increasing its professionalism, efficiency and transparency.

25 years later the judiciary landscape still varies a lot across the region. New EU member states had to comply with EU accession rules including aligning their judicial system and legislation with EU standards, yet many challenges lay ahead.

As part of the reforms new, more efficient systems of court organization and administration have been introduced, including first generation of court management and case management systems, ERP systems, electronic registries and individual agendas.

Main challenges of the justice sectorDespite the general ICT* under investment of the sector in Central and Eastern Europe the availability of PC’s and other IT equipment in courts has significantly increased. This paradoxically results in faster electronic production of paper documents, most of which are exchanged, stored, accessed and archived in traditional 19th century ways. Many courts still work exclusively with paper files and offer limited access through other communication channels to parties, other courts and law enforcement agencies. It is not uncommon that paper proCentral and Eastern Europedings from a complex case weigh a hundreds of kilograms, adding problems with storage, access, transportation, security and preservation of the files.

This results in a highly overloaded the court system, extended timelines for court cases resolutions, increased risk of errors and a generally low level of confidence in the rule of law. This is further accented by an increase in the number of applications to the courts. The economic crisis and economic slowdown in Europe brought an ever increasing number of individual or company insolvency and execution cases.

Frequent political changes induce changes in legislation, introducing errors and distortions during the legislation process and affecting the stability of the legal environment. New laws require re-education of professionals and the whole of society as well as new constructions and judicature.

Therefore to varying degrees, Central and Eastern Europe countries still suffer from a relatively low level of public confidence in the rule of law and timely law enforcement capacity of the state. Judicial reforms became not only a political necessity, but also a necessary condition to economic stability and growth. Continuing high levels of perceived corruption, slowness of the courts and frequent changes in legislation discourage foreign direct investments, economic cooperation and trade. Most of the countries still lack a broader e-justice concept and strategy. Enhancement efforts are dispersed in a number of not very coordinated initiatives.

Although much progress has been made on law and legal procedures, harmonizing the use of ICT at the European level only reflects the state of the sector in individual countries. While the EU portals mainly provide unidirectional information and guidance, describe cross-border procedures and allow for downloading standardized forms, paper form largely prevails in all legal acts and all cross border cooperation. The most notable exception being the European Criminal Records Information System (ECRIS).

Public Sector White Paper – E-Justice in Central and Eastern Europe

* Information and Communication Technology

“ Judicial reforms became not only a political necessity, but also a necessary condition to economic stability and growth.” – Milan Sterba, HP Public Sector Business

Consultant

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Caveats and obstacles

As always, the big challenge of the e-Justice transformation is the management of the change. New approaches will find a lot of resistance in a sector which is very formalized and traditional. Giving up physical control of the paper files and transitioning to a realm of fully digitized document flow can be a very unacceptable idea for more than a few. At the same time, the situation today has many of the characteristics of a “burning platform”.

The broader introduction of e-Justice solutions has legislative requirements as well. The full equivalence of electronic documents to paper based ones must be ensured. This goes hand in hand with organizational changes and technical enablement.

Justice also sets extreme security requirements that imply a significant strengthening of the cyber security of the e-Justice systems and data. Services beyond standard on-line information provision require authoritative on-line identification and authentication schemes (ideally based on a nation-wide electronic ID scheme) as well as systems of secure and trusted delivery of documents to parties. Governments in the region are gradually introducing nation-wide electronic ID and trust schemes that will become unified across EU after the adoption of the new eIDAS1 regulation. Some countries introduce universal trusted document delivery schemes (e.g. Czech “data boxes”, the new electronic documents delivery system has launched by the Ministry of the Interior and the Czech Post.)

Another big challenge are the kilometers of paper folders associated with the court archives. Gradually, all new and living court files will be digitized. While we will have a long transition period where we will have both electronic and paper court files, finally, over time, traditional paper case files will disappear and fully paperless courts will be the new standard.

Applying available best practices, today’s technologies, and using financial and other resources coming from EU and other IFO’s to address the pressing challenges of justice in Central and Eastern Europe can really make the change.

Public Sector White Paper – E-Justice in Central and Eastern Europe

1 The eIDAS, Electronic Identification and Trust Services Regulation aims at boosting the user convenience, trust and confidence in the digital world, while keeping pace with technological developments, promoting innovation and stimulating competition.

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Overcoming the challenges – how can ICT help

ICT is certainly not a direct actor in justice reforms but can be a very important enabler and accelerator. Firstly justice as a complex interconnected ecosystem with many different users can largely benefit from introducing cloud service delivery models, where the services are allocated based on the degree of commonality and specific service level requirements. This can result in great efficiency improvements and standardization of the service levels across the sector in basic IT services like workplace and mobility management, or unified communication as well as non-core business services like ERP, HR, or procurement. Re-architecting the systems according to service oriented principles will make them more flexible and allow for future integrations.

Backlog decreaseThe courts’ backlogs can be dramatically decreased by opening a secure digital access to electronic court files to all authorized parties, allowing them on-line consultation, search and download of the files, enabling e-filing and secure on-line execution of other formally required legal acts. Some more simple standardized legal transactions can be further automated to decrease the workload. Alternative dispute resolution procedures can also benefit from such ICT support and further decrease the backlog.

Paperless functioningICT can provide direct assistance to judges, court clerks, prosecutors and attorneys in terms of court files access, IT supported creation, and access. All documents, court hearing records and other media that become a standard part of court documentation should be stored in digital format, readily available and searchable by all authorized parties. Tolls that allow blending, processing and search across different media, including automated speech-to-text transcripts are being increasingly used by professionals. Today’s technologies enable a fully paperless functioning of the courts. We can already see many examples of this like the Justice Electronic Library System in San Diego County District Attorney Office or the Central Electronic Payment Order in Czech Republic.

Modern record managementThe records produced by justice represent critical information and need to be managed, maintained and archived with extreme caution and to the letter of the law. To fight the mountains of paper modern record management systems allow us to capture, manage, access and archive in a seamless way records containing all kind of information types including structured, semi-structured and unstructured information, multimedia as well as physical records. A good example of such a complex approach is the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Digital archives can then classify, retain on a long-term and protect documents in full compliance with regulation, meeting the most strict security standards, allowing for rich on-line meaning based end-user search, e-discovery and investigations, while offloading the production systems.

Secure digital information exchangeSecure digital information exchange with guaranteed delivery can be extended not only to ensure secure electronic court files exchange between courts of different levels but also to include all other parties in the end-to-end law enforcement value chain, including police, prosecution, courts, parties, and penitentiary and probation services as this is the case for example in the Causeway system in Northern Ireland. Such solutions represent the highest potential benefits in cost savings and increased efficiency.

Full digitization of proceduresSignificant improvements can also be brought by ICT by full digitization of procedures related to administration and management of registers maintained by justice. The speed of registering and establishing a business in country, managing land and building property, quick settlement of debts by reliable execution services, guaranteed protection of debtors and creditors interests in cases of insolvency are parameters an investor will evaluate prior establishing a business. Through a well considered implementation of registries and procedure automation, the Dutch Centraal Justitieel Incasso Bureau significantly improved the speed of justice decision execution in fines and confiscations achieving at the same time non-negligible economies.

Justice as a complex interconnected ecosystem with many different users can largely benefit from cloud service delivery models.

Public Sector White Paper – E-Justice in Central and Eastern Europe

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Advanced information managementAccess to right information, exchange and development of knowledge and lifelong education are important characteristics for judges, court clerks and justice professionals. Advanced information management, intelligent search systems, knowledge management, social media and e-learning platforms are fundamental tools to keep the justice workers on top of their ever changing and evolving domain, especially in transforming justice systems in Central and Eastern Europe. The Belgian Federal Public Service Justice is a good example of where IT solutions helped to tackle the problem.

Social mediaGiven the large number of ongoing legislation changes, the legislation process from initialization to the publication of newly adopted laws and changes can also hugely benefit from ICT support, enabling faster, more consistent, and error free legislation process, which involves all the parties into a structured, transparent communication process when designing, developing, reviewing and amending law. Social media can play an important role in making this process open and transparent.

Publicly available sourcesAccess to justice can be improved by setting up on-line publicly accessible and easily searchable source of authoritative wording of law and regulation valid at any particular moment in time in the past. Such systems can be further complemented by legal aid capabilities provided on-line to people in need. Publicly available information about courts and activities should be easily accessible based on the principles of open data, addressing the need for transparency of justice.

Improved law enforcement and prosecutionICT can also significantly improve preventive and investigative phases of law enforcement and prosecution, starting from monitoring, information gathering, analysis and identification of suspect behavior patterns in all kinds of domains, ensuring physical and cyber security, gathering and evaluating evidence.

Correctional and probation servicesLet us not forget correctional and probation services, where IT technologies are typically even less advanced than in courts. Digitizing and managing records electronically brings high efficiency and security gains to the system as it is the case in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Prisons are large complex organizations with a number of specific needs that can be optimized by introducing shared e-services in procurement, HR management or ERP as we can see in Her Majesty’s Prison Service in the UK. IT solutions can also increase mobility of justice employees wherever required, like it is the case in the Dutch Probation Services.

The HP vision consists of a coordinated strategic approach to Central and Eastern Europe governments that will materialize all the above mentioned opportunities in a coherent and coordinated way, using modern transformation, program management and enterprise architecture approaches to bring e-Justice to life as a new standard.

Public Sector White Paper – E-Justice in Central and Eastern Europe

Leveraging best practices – learn from the leaders

The programs of the new EU programming period 2014-2020 attach a huge importance to further improvements of the judicial system including broader cooperation in justice across EU based on broader use of ICT. This includes areas such as the further development of the EU e-Justice portal, integration of registers (business registers, land registers, insolvency registers), improving secure and cross-border exchange and guaranteed delivery of information in legal proCentral and Eastern Europedings, broader use of video conferencing, as well as ICT support for specific agendas (small claims procedure, European payment order) and eventually full on-line dispute resolution.

Central Eastern European countries will hugely benefit from taking inspiration from these early examples of pervasive use of new style of IT in justice and law enforcement. By significantly increasing access to justice, efficiency, transparency and professionalism they can take a big step to increasing the confidence in the rule of law both internally and externally and also contribute to growth of their economy. To finance large transformation projects in justice they can mobilize different sources of funding including EU, other international financing organizations but also national sources. Optimizing the judiciary has a relatively short term impact on the overall yield of the economy, so it is worth public investment. And people and businesses are willing to pay a premium to live in a place where they can rely on justice being done in finite time.

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April 2015

Public Sector White Paper – E-Justice in Central and Eastern Europe