The Supreme Court will erase personal data from decisions already placed at its official website. Is discontent of court case parties real or just formal reason for this?

The Supreme Court announces an auction for state contract on personal data erasure from judicial acts. Its winner’s staff will be erasing all personal data from PDF files for four months.

Full names of most case parties and court officials participating in trials will remain in open access according to actual legislation. But a lot of information is to be erased, including not only passport data or income information, but also, for example, amounts of fines imposed or even – signatures of judges and case parties.

Some local courts are already erasind even dates, so that one reading a court sentence hardly can understand whether the crime was performed a month ago or ten years ago.

Ivan Pavlov, IIFD Board Chair, believes that courts will deduce their own positions basing on the opinion of the Supreme Court.

Darya Nazarova, IIFD senior lawyer, also believes that courts tend to closeness: “The tender documentation for future state contract on personal data erasure from the Supreme Court acts mentions rather large volumes of information. However, some of data proposed to be erased, like legal persons’ names or addresses, are subject to open access pursuant to actual legislation. Some other data can hardly be qualified as personal: for example, address of the place of crime. And who and why needs erasing judges’ sugnatures from court decisions? Such an approach from the Supreme Court can be hazardous since it leads to elimination of large volumes of information from published judicial acts even if the information in question can make no damage to any party of a court trial”.

Such a questionable trend can knock out all efforts aimed to enable judicial informational transparency in Russia.