Calls for proposals have been issued for action grants from the European Commission Directorate General Justice, in the areas of Criminal Justice and Civil Justice.
A wide range of technology-related justice projects are eligible for funding under both programs.
Submission deadline for criminal justice grants is 30 May 2013.
Submission deadline for civil justice grants is 4 June 2013.
For details, please see the calls.
HT @eJustitie
Professor Dr. Cláudio de Lucena Neto of Universidade Estadual da Paraíba Departamento de Direito Privado presented a paper entitled The [Effects] of Lawsuit Automation in a Labour Court and in a Common Justice Court in the State of Paraíba, Brazil: A Comparative Case Study, at LexInformatica 2011 / CLIT 2011: The 4th Regional Conference on Law and Electronic Communications / The 5th Regional Conference on Cybercrime, Law and Information Technology, held 29-30 June 2011, in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa. Here is the abstract:
Technological development has introduced deep changes in the legal field. In Brazil, the introduction of new technologies in legal activities that made it possible for a lawsuit to be fully conducted by electronic means in the various courts and judicial instances, is a remarkable process, that keeps being constantly improved.
Information systems and lawsuit processing software applications were regulated in Brazil with the introduction of Federal Law number 11.419/2006, which enables the organisms of the Judiciary Power to fully or partially automate its lawsuits, making the practice of procedural acts, as the sending of an electronic petition and other procedural communications, possible through Internet. Moreover, the referred legal text faces criticism from authors in Brazil, under the argument that it already went into effect with flaws, and that it is not able, in the present, to reflect the recent changes and updates in the field of new technologies.
Although not yet implemented in all judicial organisms, instances and districts, lawsuit processing software applications are already adopted in various spheres of justice administration. An experience that occurs in Labor Courts, one of the pioneer instances to implement automation lawsuit tools in all its districts and in the creation of a fully electronic pilot project district should be highlighted in the Brazilian national scenario, in comparison to a Common Justice District, which is based on traditional, paper processing practices.
The use of information systems and lawsuit processing software applications, besides being an important tool in the numerous attempts to enhance the speed of the legal system’s response to the citizen, also reflects in the internal organization of the judiciary system, and in the practices of lawyers and the citizens themselves, as it happens with the information search and petition system which can be operated through the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it brings along flaws and difficulties, as privacy issues and technical support problems which have not been easily solved, troubles that represent obstacles which need to be faced and surpassed, on the way to the offer of an adequate judicial service.
For the full text of the paper, please contact the author. Thanks to Dr. de Lucena Neto for granting permission to post the abstract.
A related paper, Cláudio de Lucena Neto and Coronel Salvino de Figueiredo, The Potential of e-Justice in Brazil, was presented at The 3rd International Seminar on Information Law, 25-26 June 2010, in Corfu, Greece.
Kate Krontiris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the MIT Sloan School of Management has released two new posts on the topic of “mobile justice”: Mobile Justice in 500 Words, and On the Many Manifestations of “Mobile Justice,” on her tumblr.
In the first post, Ms. Krontiris defines “mobile justice” as “the idea that mobile technologies, broadly defined, can be used to extend and improve access to justice.” She states that the term “includes initiatives such as virtual courts in Kenya, live-streamed court proceedings in Massachusetts, and SMS-sharing of legal judgments in Ghana”; and that mobile justice efforts are being undertaken by governments, civil society organizations, and businesses, and “almost always require the strong collaboration of all of these stakeholders.” The post goes on to discuss how mobile justice initiatives are being used in the reform of judicial processes, and may contribute to improving the rule of law and human rights enforcement in many jurisdictions.
In the second post, Ms. Krontiris discusses private mobile justice providers. The post focuses on Crimefighters, a “[c]onfidential information hotline” — offered in Ghana by mobile phone company MTN — that enables citizens to report crimes via mobile phone, free of charge. With MTN as an example, the post discusses “the emerging role of private actors in resourcing public” justice information and communication services.
These posts follow on Ms. Krontiris’s 2010 post on mobile justice, Using Technology to Bridge the Gap, at the U.S. Department of State’s DipNote blog, and her 2010 post, On the Potential of Mobile Justice, at Huffington Post.
A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 1 September 2010 — has been issued for Civil Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JCIV/AG, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.
Applications are invited respecting the areas of e-Justice or the training of legal practitioners.
For more information, please see the call for proposals.
Judge Dory Reiling, Ph.D., Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court, has published a new blogpost entitled Nieuw! Visie op de rechtspraak, at her blog on Mr. Online.
The post comments on the report issued last month, entitled Visie op de rechtspraak, which set out a proposed vision of the future for the the administration of justice in The Netherlands.
In her post, Judge Reiling remarks on the lack of attention to technology in the Visie op de rechtspraak report. Judge Reiling presents an alternative vision — which she calls 2020: e-Justice op Rechtspraak.nl — of future justice administration in The Netherlands, in which technology — including online access to primary legal information — plays an essential role.
[NOTE: In addition to the call for proposals described on this post, readers may be interested in the call for proposals for 2010 e-Justice Action Grants, designated JLS/2010/JPEN/AG/EJ.]
A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 15 September 2010 — has been issued for Criminal Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JPEN/AG, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.
Proposals are invited on the following legal informatics topics:
Interconnection of criminal records
“National and transnational projects concerning the interconnection of national criminal record IT systems within the EU presented by national central authorities [...]. Exchange of information about convictions in the EU is to be facilitated through the creation of a computerised system of exchange of information ECRIS-European Criminal Records Information System. Projects should have one or more of the following objectives:”
European e-Justice
“A separate call for European e-Justice with specific conditions is foreseen and has already been published. However, European e-Justice is also one of the priorities of this general call under the Criminal Justice Programme in 2010. In this general call, non-profit organisations are encouraged to participate in the development of European e-Justice. Their projects should help develop the use of electronic tools in the context of justice, taking into consideration national developments on the basis of exchange of best practice.
“All projects should aim to provide practical tools to enable better access to crossborder justice for EU citizens. [...]“
Proposals are invited on the following topics:
For more information, please see the call for proposals.
[NOTE: In addition to the call for proposals described on this post, readers may be interested in the call for proposals for 2010 Criminal Justice Action Grants, designated JLS/2010/JPEN/AG.]
A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 4 August 2010 — has been issued for e-Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JPEN/AG/EJ, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.
According to the call, “[a]ll projects should aim to provide practical tools to enable better access to crossborder justice for EU citizens.”
Proposals are invited on the following topics:
For more information, please see the call for proposals.
HT Ronald van den Hoogen.
Benjamin Lesjak of the University of Maribor Faculty of Law will present a paper entitled A Proposal of Representative Legal e-Services Based on a Slovenian Case Study, at The eChallenges e-2010 Conference, to be held 27-29 October 2010, in Warsaw, Poland. Here is the abstract of the paper:
Information technology is widely used in all governmental sectors and its use is very much spread in justice sector, as well. Introduction of use of IT in justice sector is mostly developed under initiatives of national Ministries of Justice, courts and other agencies from legal system, which responded with various legal services to the need of citizens, businesses, legal practitioners and the judicial authorities to conduct some of the judiciary services by electronic means. Should the use and introduction of IT in justice sector be treated as a part of e-government initiative (C2G, B2G and G2G) is a discussion of some authors in e-government literature. It is important in some way to distinguish between e-government and e-justice, particularly because of the independency of the judiciary. An initiative of the European e-justice started in 2007 under Council of EU. Its working party for legal data processing (e-justice) started a discussion and preparation of European e-justice among EU member states as separated project to e-government but still emphasized the great importance of e-government and its achievement in authentication, interoperability framework, e-Signature, e-Identity, which will make use of existing modern technologies, as mentioned in The Council’s Multi annual European e-justice action plan 2009-2013 (OJ 2009/C 75/01).
When delivering service to above mentioned users as stated in Action plan three criteria should be established: The first is that a European e-Justice is a step on the way to the creation of a European judicial area; The second is that the projects must implement the legislative instruments already adopted by the European Community and the European Union in the field of justice; And the third criteria, that it is essential that European e-Justice should be developed so as to be of direct service to European citizens, who would benefit from its added value, specifically via the portal. When prioritizing the projects, it should be ensured that citizens could rapidly benefit the e-Justice tools. Nevertheless are the member states free to start their own e-justice projects; therefore the Ministry of Justice in Slovenia prepared its strategic plan of e-justice development. Within four key areas (Collaboration, Infrastructure, Solutions and Knowledge) different legal e-services were developed in recent years, which were on a general level accepted among users, though a detailed research of use and possible influence on efficiency on justice system was not conducted yet.
In our paper we will present a classification of legal e-services from different perspectives: user, provider, legal sector, legal grid and level of development. An overview of Slovenian legal e-services, which were developed by different stakeholders of national e-justice system from public and private sector, is to be made according to the classification. In conclusions we would like to propose a set of representative legal e-services of national justice system, which would represent an evaluation of the development of national e-justice sector in one country.
A classification is prepared with literature review that is based on findings of authors from e-government and e-justice sector and other studies at EU level. The overview of existing Slovenian legal e-services in e-justice sector is conducted with an actual search and inquiry of legal e-services. We are focused primarily on judiciary related web portals of different providers and on site evaluation according to previously mentioned classification. In the search we include various providers of legal content and services: supreme and constitutional court of Republic of Slovenia with their services, Ministry of justice, e-government portal with law related services, Ministry of internal affair with law related services, providers of public sector information (PSI) with legal content and corresponding services, and other providers. At each legal e-service a special measurement considering classification is used, where we use a scale or other type of measurement (textual description, position in a grid). A package of representative legal e-service is conducted as a proposition related to the classification and the evaluation of Slovenian legal e-services. A proposed set is taking into account user and provider perspective, legal sector of provided service, position on the legal grid and level of development. The proposition is rather an attempt to show the importance of measuring the development of e-justice in certain country and a proposition of future comparison of development of e-justice.
Core technology for legal e-services and development of e-justice is an internet based, but as mentioned before e-government has already provided certain documents and infrastructural propositions as the European interoperability framework (EIF) developed within IDABC which is a basic structure for e-government development. Therefore infrastructural and technical point of view of developmental technology of e-justice would mostly get mirrored from e-government and in many members states e-justice uses the same infrastructure. Since we have already emphasized the importance of e-government and e-justice distinction, a case study on the use of several legal services from different aspect views is conducted and a special approach is needed at e-justice. At e-government we are aware of different approach of service delivery to users (one stop shop, life events), but at e-justice no exact research exist on how to provide legal e-services to the end-users.
In conclusions we will emphasize the importance of the developing initiatives of e-justice beside very well structured and developed e-government. As e-government research activities are well developed, we should take more attention at research activities on e-justice projects and whole system from different perspectives, not only at development of new legal e-services. We have in mind theoretical and methodological foundation of e-justice, benchmarking from different perspectives and with use of various methodologies, inventory of the user requirements and processes, legal and judicial influences and not to forget the efficiency of e-justice and its influence on a legal system.
For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.
Thanks to Mr. Lesjak for providing the abstract.
