[open-government] OpenCourts: Bringing transparency to the Slovak judiciary

Tue Nov 26 20:38:04 UTC 2013

FYI everyone.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/11/26/opengov-voices-opencourts-bringing-transparency-to-the-slovak-judiciary/

OpenGov Voices: OpenCourts: Bringing transparency to the Slovak
judiciary<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/11/26/opengov-voices-opencourts-bringing-transparency-to-the-slovak-judiciary/>
by guest author Samuel SpáčNov. 26, 2013, 10 a.m.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing
comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight
Foundation or any[image: Samuel Spac]employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation
is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the
guest blog.

*Samuel Spáč is a project coordinator and junior analyst at Transparency
International Slovakia <http://www.transparency.sk/>. In 2013 he graduated
in Political Science at the Central European University in Budapest where
he received the Best MA Thesis Award for his research on the development of
judiciary in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Currently he is working on
his PhD at the Comenius University in Bratislava. Besides courts and
politics he is passionate about soccer and cooking. Samuel can be reached
atspac at transparency.sk <spac at transparency.sk>.*

According to the latest Global Corruption
Barometer<http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013>,
the judiciary in Slovakia is the least trusted institution in the world,
and 70% of Slovakians consider it to be corrupt. This is partly because the
Slovak judiciary system has no external influence and enjoys a very high
level of independence not only from other branches of power, but also from
the general public. Last July, the OpenCourts
portal<http://www.otvorenesudy.sk/>(available
only in Slovak and the first open data project dealing with the judiciary
branch) was launched by Transparency International
Slovakia<http://www.transparency.sk/>.
Its main goal is to make the Slovakian system more transparent and allow
the public to control courts and judges in order to hold them accountable.

Since 2011, a lot of information on courts and judges has been made
available through reforms aimed at opening up the judiciary. However, this
data was scattered throughout several different government websites and was
not easily searchable. For this reason, OpenCourts
<http://otvorenesudy.sk/> collects
all information that is relevant and available and offers it to the public
for free and in a user-friendly format. All in one convenient location! If
you are interested in the project, the code is available on
GitHub<https://github.com/otvorenesudy>
.

So what kind of information does one find on
OpenCourts<http://otvorenesudy.sk/>?
As of Friday, November 8, there were more than 745,000 judicial decisions
available on the website, including almost 400,000 records of past or
future hearings held by the courts. This allows the public to see how often
a particular judge holds hearings in order to decide a case. It also
enables the user to read the said judge’s decisions and see interpretations
of legal provisions. The website also includes some summary data about
courts, such as the current number of judges at a court and at the same
time enables users to easily find personalized judge profiles.
[image: Map of family connection in Slovak
courts]<http://sudy.transparency.sk/>*Map
showing family connections in Slovak courts.*

Each court’s page shows information on the average length of time spent on
criminal, civil, business and child-care cases in the last three years. It
also shows court rankings where users can compare courts and see which one
hears cases in the shortest amount of time. The website also displays
different statistics about the judges’ profiles. The public can find out
when a judge was appointed to the position and the number of hearings and
decisions registered under his or her name. One can also learn about an
individual judge’s performance, such as the success rate of appeals to
higher court following his or her decision, the number of backlog cases as
compared to previous years or the number of fines a court was obliged to
pay due to a judge’s bad decisions or unnecessary delays in judicial
proceedings.

We use data from the judges’ property declarations to show whether a judge
has family members or relatives working in the judiciary or at the
ministry. OpenCourts also recently published a short article on courts with
a map of family connections <http://sudy.transparency.sk/> in Slovak courts.

Also included in OpenCourts <http://otvorenesudy.sk/> is information on all
judge profiles who applied to any position in the judiciary in the last
couple of years, including their CVs and motivation letters -- allowing the
public to easily learn more about the judges’ education, prior experience
and possibly discover something interesting about their motivations and
intentions in judicial positions.

As explained above, the portal contains a variety of data from several
different sources. Not all of this information is updated automatically
though. Therefore, in order to sustain the quality of the information on
the website, further financial support is required. Each year, it is
necessary to obtain and process data which is often published in
non-machine readable format or data that needs to be requested through the
Freedom of Information Act.

Perhaps it is too early to evaluate the success of the portal, but so far
the average number of visits is more than 10 times higher than visits to
other open data portals in Slovakia -- reaching as many as about 1,100
visits during each work day. The portal also has twice as many visits than
the official governmental portal where judicial decisions are published.
The feedback we have received from users is that our site is used by the
general public, media and also legal professionals. Visitors to the portal
also provided input on some of the information that should be on the site
such as judicial decisions that ought to be published.

The ultimate goal of the website is to increase public pressure on judges
and call for effective accountability against those that are continually
under-performing.

Our future plan is to develop a more sophisticated methodology focusing on
particular judges to evaluate their performance. Up until now, based on the
data we gathered, we identified the worst performing courts in a short
analysis<http://transparency.blog.sme.sk/c/336720/Za-chyby-sudov-platime-rocne-takmer-milion-eur.html>
(available
in Slovak only). The analysis was also discussed by some of the country’s
major print media. In the last couple of years, the debate about the
judiciary in Slovakia has been quite heated, but our objective is to step
aside from generalizing statements and inspire a rather data-driven
discussion.

If you are interested in supporting this initiative, please consider a
donation here <https://transparency.darujme.sk/284/>.

*Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us
at guestblog at sunlightfoundation.com. <guestblog at sunlightfoundation.com>*

-- 
Júlia Keserű
International Program Coordinator

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
(1) 202-742-1520 *280

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