We are pleased to welcome a new member of our Fund for Regional Cooperation family. The predefined project “Foster transparency of judicial decisions and enhancing the national implementation of the ECHR” is implemented by the Council of Europe (CoE) and will cover Cyprus, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia, engaging in cooperation the ministries of justice and supreme courts of these countries.
The project’s objective is strengthening of human rights protection and the rule of law through increase of consistency of national judicial decisions with the respective European standards. The project will address functioning of the judiciaries and strengthen the quality of their judicial decision-making through integration of specialised tools and solutions aimed at an early identification of systemic human rights problems existing at national level. With this intervention, the CoE aims at improvement of transparency and consistency of national judicial decisions and exchange of the most up to date information on human rights issues. The project is designed following the entry into force of Protocol no. 15 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to foster cooperation on enhancing the national implementation of the ECHR through digitalisation processes on-going in national judiciaries. For this purpose, a variety of support activities, including training, methodological and expert advice, introducing digital instruments into judicial processes and other technical solutions will be proposed.
Transparency of judicial process and consistency of judicial decisions can be improved through their publication. Such publication required anonymisation of the documents. This can be done with application of special technical and methodological solutions which could assist in automatization of the preparation of the document for its publication. At the same time, such technical solutions can be used for recognition of some key words in the document and proposed categorisation. Such categorisation may be matched with the categorisation applied by the European Court of Human Rights making available access to knowledge management solutions existing at the European Court. Categorisation of cases will also allow to identify human rights issues (including new challenges), collect and analyse additional internal statistics on various human rights cases, reveal discrepancy and inconsistency in judicial decision-making, receive information about respective standards of the European Court of Human Rights for the relevant cases and situations. Additionally, categorisation proposed for the cases may be used for adjustment of search in national case law databases. This shall allow to speed up the administration of justice without comprising its quality and with faster and easier access to knowledge on human rights. Effective implementation of proposed methodologies and novel IT tools shall boost ECHR-compliant adjudication in national courts in line with the principle of subsidiarity.
The project implementation began in April 2022. We are thrilled to follow its updates and present them here in our MAG.
Małgorzata Nowak, Fund Manager
