INTERVENTO PRONUNCIATO DALL’ITALIA AL SIDE EVENT SU “PROVIDING ACCESS TO LEGAL INFORMATION TO ACCELERATE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT” (24 giugno 2015)

The experience of the Center for electronic documentation (CED) of the Italian High Court

1. SUPPORTING RULE OF LAW AND DEVELOPMENT

Free public access to the jurisprudence of the High Court of Italy is both an opportunity for users to enhance their knowledge of the legal system, promoting greater awareness of one’s rights and duties, and a response to the need to make judiciary services more transparent and usable.
The transparency and accountability of the judiciary contribute to reinforcing the rule of law, to building people’s confidence in democratic institutions and to unleashing energies that can create development and well-being.

2. SUPPORTING THE WORK OF JUDGES AND PROFESSIONALS

To this end the Italian High Court in 1964 created the first program for searching relevant rulings of the Court. The procedure was originally based on IBM punched data processing cards. In 1969, however, the system was overhauled through the adoption of UNIVAC to facilitate searches in an environment that counts hundreds of thousands of documents.

The Center for electronic documentation (CED) was established in 1970, and its current website –ITALGIUREWEB – hosts approximately 510,000 maxims related to civil, labor and taxation cases and 162,000 related to criminal cases; 400,000 civil rulings and 531,000 criminal; over 750,000 legal interpretations and almost 40,000 rulings for each of the two European Courts in Luxembourg and Strasbourg.

The service makes all documents available to (approximately 12,000) Italian judges, magistrates and attorneys, as well as to (approximately 30,000) law scholars, professionals and lawyers.

Further innovative research functions have been introduced (by hypertext, rapporteur/writer, members of the board, type of device) when referencing a full text in PDF format, thus facilitating wider access compared to the previous searches enabled only by date or number of document.

The same attention was paid to making reports available (especially on new regulations or particularly important juridical matters) drafted by the Filing and Procedures Office of the Court, in both the civil and criminal spheres.

3. SUPPORTING PUBLIC AWARENESS

In addition, something that is an absolute first for the High Court, the website will offer free of charge access to a new archive, “SentenzeWeb”, containing all of the civil and criminal rulings of the Court published in the past five years, in their unabridged versions. It is an enormous archive (with over 425,000 rulings to date) made available to the public and researchable through an innovative, powerful and easy-to-use search engine – the result of the CED’s decades’ experience in the field of judicial archives.
The initiative’s success among users can be seen in the number of daily hits (about 12,000) for an overall total estimated at 650,000 searches in the past two months.

4. SUPPORTING EUROPEAN COORDINATION

The CED of the Italian High Court also collaborates within the European framework (e.Law, and e.Justice working groups), to develop research projects on forms of super-national operability of juridical information systems, that can increase mutual knowledge of judicial systems and better harmonize their content and procedures within the EU.

Noteworthy, in particular, is the CED`s participation, together with the Italian Ministry of Justice, in the E.C.L.I. – European Case-Law Identifier project, which aims to make research easier and scientifically more reliable, through the creation of a European standard, and thus disseminate knowledge of jurisprudence of the Courts of all of the Countries of the European Union.
In combination with the ELI project – European Legislation Identifier, aimed to create a single identification system of the laws of EU Countries – there will be a first phase of a more ambitious project allowing for semantic research of European legislation on the web (what is known as semantic web). It is estimated that ECLI identifiers can be running in the ITALGIUREWEB archives in a few months.

5. LOOKING AT THE FUTURE IN THE GLOBAL WORLD

The CED is now looking at and contributing to the development of a new marking regime for legal documents, called Akoma Ntoso, which, through a homogenous structuring of the documents, allows for easier, faster searches, even globally, as it is based on strong search engines.

Akoma Ntoso will thus be the new tool guaranteeing interoperability among the various national information systems.