10 December, 2021
At its meeting on 10 December, the Judicial Council heard information on the processes relevant to the judicial system - the introduction of the electronic case management system (E-case), the establishment of the Justice Training Centre and the evaluation of the Latvian judicial system in the EU comparative summary of results in the field of justice.
What regards the implementation of E-case, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Aigars Strupišs informed about the decision of the plenary session of the Supreme Court of December 9 “On Ensuring the Right to a Fair Trial and Uniform Case Law in Relation to the Digitization of Court Work”. The reason for convening the extraordinary plenary session was the hasty transition to electronic proceedings, starting from December 1 this year, without ensuring the appropriate functionality of the Court Information System and technical equipment in courts. In order not to harm the interests of the parties to proceedings, not to prolong the time limits for hearing cases and not to harm the quality of legal proceedings, the plenary session provided an interpretation of the new regulation, which is intended to maintain the parallel organization of case files in full in paper format until the necessary improvements to the IT systems are made and the courts are provided with the technical equipment needed to conduct case management fully electronically.As to the establishment of a Justice Training Centre, the Ministry of Justice informed about the progress of the project of establishing the Justice Training Centre. It is planned that the Justice Training Centre will commence operation on January 1, 2025. The funding is provided from the European Union Recovery Fund. For the establishment of the Justice Training Centre, the Ministry has four directions of action: launching a project of administrative operations; substantive activities of the project implementation (training activities); infrastructure adaptation; development of the regulatory enactment base.Speaking about the EU Justice Scoreboard, Dace Šulmane, Adviser to the Secretariat of the Judicial Council, presented the latest EU Member States' scoreboard in the field of justice (EU Justice Scoreboard 2021). However, it was pointed out that the data included in the summary were two years old, so the situation might be different now. In this summary, Latvia's strengths comprise the stability of deadlines for case adjudication, the electronical availability of court rulings, case management and statistics, as well as the level of independence of the prosecutor's office and the bar. Latvia's weak points include slow improvements in the perception of judicial independence and high court fees.
Information prepared by
Rasma Zvejniece, the Head of the Division of Communication of the Supreme Court
E-mail: rasma.zvejniece@at.gov.lv, telephone: +371 67020396, +371 28652211