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Recently, an article about online courts has appeared. What exactly does the term online court mean and why is it important to talk about it?
I would immediately distinguish between digital courts cast online courts Between.
Digital courts are mainly those developments We understand, which started in almost every country, including Hungary.
In Hungary, in 2018, Digital Courts received the collective name of the program announced by the President of the Office of National Courts, in the framework of which, for example, electronic delivery or e-file was introduced. The latter means that attorneys also have access to the entire litigation file from home, causing the inconvenience of inspecting documents in the courthouse. The courts had voice recognition devices and tablets as part of the program, and the possibilities of remote hearing were also expanded. At present, there are about 110 court buildings in Hungary that are suitable for such a trial. It is a step forward in both the criminal and civil proceedings, so that a party or witness does not have to travel a hundred kilometers to another part of the country, but can also be heard through a closed data chain in the nearest court building. All the initiatives serve to make the administration of justice faster and more efficient.
How is the concept of the online court different from the digital court?
The two concepts cannot coincide.
The online court issue begins with the recognition that many legal relationships are created and fulfilled in the online space.
Just think about the conclusion of contracts. Nowadays, they are shopping more and more online, and a significant proportion of crime is committed here too, be it defamation in posts, comments, defamation or fraud on the Internet. The legislator also needs to receive new types of responses to these new types of legal relationships: new legislation is needed that can follow them. Let’s take an example: when someone orders a good from abroad, all the data is available through that Internet platform. Under current law, if this buyer were to have a dispute, they would have to present concrete evidence to the court, which is extremely difficult, almost impossible, since they have nothing tangible in their hands. Courts must be prepared to hear disputes arising from this type of relationship. That would be all
The best way would be that the court itself is not tied to a specific judicial building, but rather that the parties can communicate with the court through online access in the same way, breaking physical barriers, according to the requirements of the time.
Can we fear that certain backward and poorer strata cannot keep up with rapid technological development for purely financial reasons, and that digital or online courts will deprive them of claiming and accessing justice?
On the contrary,
By breaking down physical barriers, courts can become much more accessible.
Rather, the admission of information technology is an opportunity to enforce the right to justice more effectively. The diffusion and application of smart devices, whether we analyze the number of units or the services, is growing exponentially. Trends show that the layer that is completely excluded from this is shrinking. In ten or twenty years, in my opinion
there will be far fewer technical illiterates than legal illiterates.
In the case of online courts, of which legal aid is an important part, in addition to the cost of travel to the court building, they can also be used to save on expensive legal aid. If these platforms help the client to find the title, submit the forms or attempt a specific deal, they also guarantee equality of arms. This can offset the disadvantage of one party not having legal representation for the other. In the current system, there is much less assistance available to litigants and clients.
I am sure an experienced judge will draw on their personal intuitions and impressions when listening to a litigant or witness and ultimately when making their decision, if not consciously. This can be heavily influenced by metacommunication, which is evident in the presence of a personal meeting room, but can it work just as well for a remote audience when the other person is not there?
In fact, in today’s civil and criminal proceedings immediacy, a orality and the public is based on the principle of
There are civil cases, and most types of crime do, where you cannot do without personal appearance, that is, frankness.
that is why online courts will not be able to replace physical courts in these areas. At the same time, the judicial processes are staggered, after the first instance process, in the second or third instance, almost little or in exceptional cases, evidence can be taken and new evidence presented. These courts already decide on the basis of the documents, including whether they can hold a hearing at which the parties can appear. It is conceivable that the online method could trigger a personal presence at a higher judicial level.
If the online court system is up and running and the experience is good, it will grow like a small sphere.
More and more legal areas and issues may fall within its purview as it becomes more common and accepted not only by the legal profession but also by clients. Lawyers tend to say, insisting on the usual and familiar systems, that this cannot be changed, but we are not the clients, but the citizens and economic operators. We need to be able to respond.
And the principle of advertising?
The principle of publicity is easier to handle, according to the English model, the entire trial is videotaped and then published on the court’s website. The entire essay is available to anyone in retrospect. On the other hand, at the moment, as a general rule, anyone can enter a concrete test, they cannot make a recording there, if we think about it, it really only leaves an impression. However
when recording, and nobody, anytime, any number of times look back, it means a much broader guarantee to the public somewhere.
Are there good foreign examples?
Within Europe, the UK has made progress in this area. In 2017, a reform was launched with significant state support. Parliament has voted £ 1 billion to remove any obstacles to the current English organizational-procedural system that could be an obstacle to effective implementation. Part of that is building Her Majesty’s Court online. As a practicing judge, we are often faced with the problem of cases brought to us in a way where clients know little about their rights and obligations. They try to assert a claim in court for a sense of justice that is born to them, and then here they face the rules of the game, what should they have presented, what are the costs, how long is it, how many resources are available. The essence of the English reform is that it is with this information that they try to help customers online, 24 hours a day, through any smart device. If no agreement is reached, the court will enter online. At any time, a judge acting in an online court can decide that if the dispute is still not easy to understand, it will be referred to ordinary court proceedings and the parties can pursue it in the traditional way.
There are online courts in Canada, Australia or Singapore, and experience has shown that more cases are brought or decided here each year.
by not seeking an ordinary judicial recourse. This means that the parties are satisfied with the service they receive in this way.
Artificial intelligence based on big data is already used in the United States in the field of justice. It is called to help, for example, to decide whether to put someone in advance. The peculiarity of big data is that it processes data in a large quantity spontaneously, at the micro level, which gives a predictive capacity to the person in whose hands this power is concentrated. Doesn’t automated decision making threaten us?
Even today, there is a tendency, mainly on the part of lawyers, to try to decipher how a particular judge is used to deciding on a particular point of law, and from this it follows what decision is expected of him in a new trial .
In France, for example, the judicial analysis program has already been banned, and its use has even appeared in the Penal Code as a separate offense.
It is also known that within the United States, where regulations vary from state to state, there may be a greater amount of compensation or a lower fine for the same in another state.
of special importance are the conclusions drawn using Big Data.
The possibilities offered by artificial intelligence will surely soon be at the disposal of the courts. However, no program should take responsibility for the final decision. As a judge, I can imagine relying on the suggestions of such an algorithm as a kind of preliminary idea, but it cannot be an automatism. Although the danger is there and it is real. What we have with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the American continent. here
carried out a study in which an application called Prometea was made available to the judges, in which, based on previous jurisprudence, it proposed the decision. The end result was that in 33 of the 33 cases, the judges accepted the decision recommended by the program.
It may be a distant analogy, but I was reminded of Lombroso’s theory of anthropological criminology. At the time, it was thought to decide who was a natural born criminal based on certain facial features, and algorithms could soon decide that someone had, say, a 90 percent chance of committing certain crimes based on certain patterns of behavior. . Where can you draw the line?
The question is:
Does it not mean greater certainty, although not infallibility, if an artificial intelligence, processing millions of data, brings me a certain percentage of result, so I can still say that I do not accept it? If the algorithm returns 87 percent, have a judge stand up to say they don’t agree with it.
It’s kind of a trap. If we let smart technology in, it will take over part of the human decision. The most important area of judicial activity is the decision itself, which must be kept in human hands, even with human error. Take the example of autonomous cars. They feed off an endless pattern of traffic incidents: for example, if a girl leaves the road on the right and an old aunt comes from the left and a collision is inevitable. Can artificial intelligence make such a decision of man or not? Because if we decide to let autonomous cars into our lives, it will surely take over. It is yet another question of who will be legally responsible, the driver or the manufacturer.
We must leave the answers to human humanity to questions such as whether someone is guilty or not guilty, whether or not there will be a relapse, whether we are excluded from conditionality or not. However, this is our idea, here and now, in 2020. What our children will say on this question in 2030 or 2040, if they will have more confidence in human decisions instead of artificial intelligence, I am no longer sure.
(Cover Image: Attila Trenka / Index)
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