From eJustice to Open Judiciary

This chapter will consider the Portuguese context, with a relatively ‘traditional' eGovernment successful development, to analyse the way eJustice and open judiciary have progressed. The aim is to provide useful insights which may be considered in other contexts (countries), including a reflection on the factors that may account for differences in eJustice and open judiciary development when compared to eGovernment and open government achievements. eGovernment, eJustice, open government and open judiciary development processes are placed in dialogue, in order to discuss the factors that have contributed to differences and similarities in both generic eGovernment and open government and specific eJustice and open judiciary development in Portugal.

Open Data for Open Justice in Seven Latin American Countries

The study focuses on the openness of judicial data in seven countries in Latin America. The judiciary continues to be among the least willing institutions to implement policies on transparency and access to information, generally because of their conservative tradition and lack of accountability practices. The study adopted an exploratory design in order to analyze enabling country and judicial contexts for open data, as well as whether judicial data publication meets open data standards of accessibility, sustainability, re-usability and non-discrimination. Study results show that even though access to judicial information is increasing and that there is also an increase in transparency policies for the judiciary, the publication of judicial data in open formats is still infrequent. This research seeks to build a baseline for an initial measurement that can be compared with future measurements, so as to be able to evaluate progress made in Latin American judiciaries.

Open Judiciary in High Courts

With this work, it is hoped to offer an insight into open judiciary applied to the specific context of constitutional courts in the Civil Law system from both a legal and technological point of view. The advances in IT are now becoming the drivers of social change and new ways for citizens and public administrations to interrelate. Information technology has enabled a different way for citizens to access public services under an e-Government umbrella to a greater or lesser degree of success. In the area of e-Justice it would appear that advances are perceived in different ways, particularly in the higher courts. This chapter will set out how constitutional justice is integrated into the world of electronic justice as an example of a genuine challenge that is full of paradoxes.

Open Judiciary Worldwide

Despite its origins, openness in the judiciary has expanded beyond transparency and, therefore, beyond the common law open justice principle. Several initiatives worldwide are echoing this trend and a new term, open judiciary, is arising as a way to address openness in the justice field. This chapter gives an overview of open judiciary initiatives worldwide, focusing on some of the most successful, in order to identify drivers of adoption, critical success factors, and preliminary results. The research is embedded in a broader exploratory study on the state of the art of open judiciary. The chapter is addressed to answer two of the research questions: What are some learning practices that can be identified worldwide in relation to openness in the judiciary? What are some of the most important lessons that can be learnt from these practices?

Consumer “Access to Justice” in EU in Low-Value Cross-Border Disputes and the Role of Online Dispute Resolution

This paper examines consumer access to justice in the EU by analysing how Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) can improve this access, especially in the case of low-value cross-border disputes, which constitute the majority of consumer contract complaints. The discussion is based on a widened concept of open justice that not only seeks to provide greater transparency, but also greater participation and collaboration as a means to improve consumer access to justice. The approach deals with the subjective and objective obstacles to accessing justice and the role of participatory justice. Finally, the paper examines the decisions taken by the EU in its attempt to foster both ADRs and ODRs for consumer disputes and determines which obstacles have been eliminated in promoting access to justice.

Openlaws.eu

Legal texts represent a fundamental building block in all democratic states. As such, legal information must be accessible to all members of society to the widest possible extent, to aid inclusiveness and to enable participation in public decision-making. In recognition of this, the EU and its Member States work to make laws, court decisions, etc. publicly available online. The sheer mass of legal norms, instruments, and interpretations in court decisions, commentaries and other sources, makes it increasingly difficult for citizens, civil society, businesses, and all involved stakeholders in legal practices to locate the relevant law. The challenge is to interlink local legal information and to have structures in place to enrich this information through aggregation and mass customization. The technological possibilities to achieve this goal do exist. The European project openlaws.eu aims for initiating a platform and to develop a vision for Big Open Legal Data (BOLD): an open framework for legislation, case law, and legal literature from across Europe.

Integrating Semi-Open Data in a Criminal Judicial Setting

Judiciary systems comprise various partner organizations (e.g., police, public prosecutor, courts, and rehabilitation centres) that collaboratively resolve criminal cases. These partner organizations have their own data administration and management systems, which are setup/operated separately and integrated barely. This chapter explains the approach of the authors' organization for integrating the data sets of the Dutch judiciary systems, and for opening the data integration outcomes to the public and/or to specific groups. These outcomes (e.g., data sets and reports) are meant to provide useful insights into (the performances of) the partner organizations individually and collectively. Such data opening efforts do not comply with all Open Data requirements, mainly due to the quality, (privacy) sensitivity and interoperability issues of the raw data. Nevertheless, since these initiatives aim at delivering some benefits of Open Data, the chapter introduces the new paradigm of Semi-Open Data for acknowledging such data opening initiatives.

Open Judiciary in a Closed Society

This chapter examines the open government initiative and the application of open government principles to the court system in China in order to illustrate what “open judiciary”—and, ultimately, an “open state”—looks like in a relatively closed society. The authors present a comprehensive background of China's open government initiative and related court reform efforts, along with critical analysis of trends in “Guiding Cases” (“GCs”), de facto binding precedents released by the Supreme People's Court (SPC) of China, and subsequent cases (“SCs”) that cite GCs. Drawing on these theoretical and empirical studies, the authors discuss the prospects of leveraging China's open government and open judiciary efforts to develop an open state in the country and identify key factors for promoting open judiciary in other closed societies around the world.

Open Justice in Latin America?

The new trend of information technology and communications has been adopted by court systems. A similar path follows other powers in the republics: executive branches with e-government portals and legislative branches with informative and participatory portals. Despite the fact that technology has reached the judiciary branch, we know very little about the changes, advantages or disadvantages of this adoption. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the use of technology, especially in the websites portals in the Latin America region. An assessment model, which has been developed by Sandoval and Gil-García (2015) and that has four components: information, interaction, integration and participation, has been implemented on a sample of 25 countries during the month of July, 2015. Findings reveal a great disparity among the different countries in the region.

Digitalizing Police Requirements

In the last one or two years, the growing demand for an open state has sped up the adoption of ICT aimed at improving access to justice, making the judiciary more transparent, increasing cooperation between legal authorities, and strengthening the justice system itself. Of particular importance are interoperability initiatives since they guarantee collaboration as well as the harmonic and cohesive functioning of different existing systems, processes, and applications that, in the justice field, are many as a result of the big variety of actors that are involved: judicial institutions but, also, different public administrations, such as those responsible of police forces, and law professionals. The chapter describes and analyzes GRP (Gestió de Requeriments Policials), a project that allows for the exchange of information between the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior in the framework of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia (Spain).