What is it
AKOMA NTOSO 1.0 Schema
Schema Repository
Issue Tracker
Documentation Glossary
Document Actions
1. Rationale
|
|
The representative Chief Justices of a large number of African judiciaries have expressed the political will of introducing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) into the courts for the benefit of increasing the efficacy of communication of judicial opinions to the public and generally improving the functioning of the judicial system. To date efforts in the area have focused primarily on the simple dissemination of judgments through electronic means with little or no awareness of the need to introduce standards and guidelines for the effective management, long-term preservation, accessibility, usability, and communication of judicial decisions.
Adoption and adherance to standards and guidelines in preparation of judicial decisions are crucial if ICTs are to be utilized to their full potential of building an effective communication and research platform for users of legal information. Standards are not new to users of legal information for example reported (published) judgments’ citations are used as a mechanism for referring to past law in legal research and writing. However, in the paper environment standards were not crucial due to the lesser volume of information available and the human ability to recognise information on consultation of each document viewed. If properly used, the digital environment allows for easier and more effective reuse of information, particularly where such information is represented in a standard form. For example, through the use of Media Neutral Citations (unique permanent identifiers, assigned to judgments by the issuing courts) coupled with paragraph numbering (facilitating pinpoint referencing) it is now possible to access and refer to both published and unpublished judgments across different media and publications. Only a few African courts have adopted the use of the above mentioned and other legal information standards for preparation of judgments. Standards and guidelines for judgment preparation seek to harmonise the publisher-neutral referencing mechanism, the set of data elements absolutely necessary for the distribution and presentation of judicial opnions, including publication restrictions, corrections and consolidations, and other structural and content elements.
It should be made clear from the outset that standardisation does not mean or imply complete homogenization. Countries and courts have the freedom and opportunity to customise and adapt common standards, provided that it is done following common guidelines, based on internationally applied best practices.
In the context of information management and global accessibility of documents the need for standardised documents is not just a desirable practise but a necessary requirement in the development of information systems capable of exploiting the unprecented opportunities of ICTs. For example, it is only through standardisation that judgments can be marked up with languages such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allows for the expression of the logical structure and significant parts of the content of documents by placing meaningful tags around pieces of information inside the text.
The opportunity to make accessible the structures and semantic components of a judgment to software applications, or in other words, to make a judgment “machine readable”, means to be able to take advantage of ICTs to access millions of documents not simply as plain undifferentiated text, but their structure and semantic components as well. In this way high value information services can be developed to assist the needs of the citizens and the court system itself.
An open XML-based standard improves the interoperability inside of the courts and through the administrative workflow. If the judge’s decisions are stored making use of XML they can be processed speedily throughout the administrative process and the entire chain of decisions is improved so that the management of cases can become faster, more efficient and cost-effective across the judicial system and government.
Judges, clerks and registrars will not have to deal with the technical issue or even see any XML markup. On the contrary, drafting tools based on traditional text editors that use templates can help the judge avoid mistakes in the citations, to structure the decision following agreed guidelines of styles, to quote other precedents without errors through XML validation, and moreover to consolidate concurring and dissenting judgments, anonymise persons mentioned in the document in specific circumstances in compliance with the law, attach tables and multimedia objects to decisions, etc.
For the above reasons, XML-based documents are strategic for both the court system and judges because they provide tools and services supporting the workflow from drafting to dissemination of the judgment (and can be extended to include the case workflow from case application to judgment dissemination), while ensuring valid representation, interoperability and increased accessibility. This will in turn increase the efficiency and responsiveness of the justice system for the users of legal information (citizens, business and legal professionals) and will allow publishers (not necessarily traditional publishers, but courts and reporting structures) to deploy legal information systems with efficient search facilities and built-in comparison and analytical tools allowing for comparative research into national, regional and international caselaw, legislation and other legal instruments.