Presentation of E-Justice ODR project in the online conference
Transnational Dipute Resolution in an Increasing Digitalised World
organised by the Center for the Future of Dispute Resolution at Ghent University
E-Justice ODR Scheme – a plan of action
Michal Araszkiewicz, Federica Casarosa, Davide Rua Carneiro, Zbynek Loebl
The Communication from the Commission on the digitalisation of justice in the EU (A toolbox of opportunities) highlights the need to safeguard access to justice keeping pace with the digital transformation affecting all aspects of our lives. The results of the latest EU justice scoreboard (July 2021), however, show that Member States are at different stages of such process of digitalisation. Therefore, there is a real risk that the existing differences in the level of national e-justice systems will increase, as the advances to end-end judicial processes and preparation for data driven processes in the first MS adopting those technologies will further accelerate the transformation in these countries in comparison with the rest.
The trends towards introduction of online courts with end-end online judicial processes and step by step introduction of data driven judicial processes assisted by machine learning is already underway in the first countries globally and will continue. The first online (state) courts have emerged in the past three years alongside private ODR platforms.
The future online justice in Europe will still be decentralized, without diverging from the decentralization that characterize the (offline) judicial systems in Europe at present. Although different judicial systems in Europe entails a high level of variability that, consequently, impact on the different needs of the parties accessing civil judicial systems, this feature is an important shield against other risks that could stem from a centralization of justice. In particular, the attempts to centralize control over judicial data which could threaten the exercise of the right to fair judicial process and EU data protection principles.
The E-Justice ODR Scheme is a project which addresses the challenges of the future transnational online justice aiming at providing, at the end of the two years, an open specification which is necessary to start developing open e-justice platforms. Such technology would be available for (and flexible to adapt to) different purposes in multiple countries, and supporting the communication with each other and the exchange of data and documents – including in relation to the cross-border cases and (in anonymized form) – to train machine-learning services assisting the parties and the judiciary. In addition, E-Justice ODR Scheme will contribute to the development of open online environment where modules of various judicial procedures can be easily modified based on legal requirements in a MS or re-use in different languages.
See more details on the conference here