Justice and Internet: "This Can Be Useful"

On August 12, 2010, IIFD experts presented at a press conference in St.-Petersburg results of the first Monitoring of the Russian federal courts’ official websites. A court traditionally has been rather a closed place. Of course the judge is a leading person at a court hearing. But courts’ staff try to extend closeness traditions outside the court hearing halls. They provide any information quite unwillingly and contact citizens at the very outside.

The law on access to judicial information came into force on July 1. It obliges the courts to launch their official websites and to place there all information on current cases. Since July 1, the IIFD experts started to monitor official websites of the federal courts of general jurisdiction.

We should remind that the law was approved in December 2008 so that courts had a year and a half to modify their activities in order to observe its provisions.

Studying the monitoring results, we would like to ask officials one question: who do they work for.

Courts for Judges?

The main goal of the research was to estimate how simplified or complicated information transfer “judge – citizen” is.

From July 1 to July 31, our experts were monitoring official websites of federal courts of general jurisdiction. This includes the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, Supreme Courts of Russian republics, Courts of other subjects of the Russian Federation, and district (first instance) courts.

Main attention was paid to information really needed by anyone dealing with a court: full names of judges, working schedules, access to case materials.

More than 2,400 courts’ websites are evaluated. The average openness amounts to 41,33%; in the opinion of Vladimir Golubev, the monitoring project leader, this shows that courts are obviously not ready to observe the new lay.

What We See

The IIFD experts consider positive that most websites use a unified template simplifying navigation. However, some local courts “improve” the website design at their own discretion and sometimes place information rather chaotically. For example, the “Budyonnovsky town court of the Stavropol Territory, places almost all information most necessary for citizens (how to apply, what duties to pay, etc.) at a webpage titled rather vaguely “It Can Be Useful” within the “Court Documents” section.

As for negative moments, there are quite a lot of them. Vladimir Golubev’s main conclusion on the monitoring results is: “There is an obvious trend to place information just formally and to refer to normative acts when applicants need specific information”. Many courts publish lots of data not included in the “judge – citizen” category, while information of real social significance is placed as the last thing. There is clear lack of willing to work with people”.

Address Unknown?

For example, only 43,97% websites publish addresses of the courts. Why is a court to hide its address and why is a citizen to perform thorough investigation to learn it?

Only 47,73% courts’ websites inform potential applicants on application procedure. Even less – 38,98% – provide information on procedure for access to case materials. And still less websites provide contact phones and working schedules of secretarial offices or dispatch offices that work with citizens before court hearings. And only 10,32% websites allow downloading duty payment receipt forms.

Instead, a court website can place advertisements of selected legal bureaus – or even an album of poetry composed by judges and/or court employees (like that of the Lipetsk Oblast Court).

Elena Golubeva, IIFD Director, comments: “What is a court? First of all, it is people who work there. Trying to lessen the number of applicants and of cases to work with, they lack wish to place online information for applicants. In our practice, we often meet judges’ statements that claims filed by our clients are “nonsense” and the court staff doesn’t want to deal with them. This is quite sad”.

The information openness ratings (in Russian) are available at the Russian page.