“Why do we want digital means?” asks one of the judges at the Ciutat de la Justícia de L’Hospitalet. “You can enter the 21st century.” This digital file you are talking about is the equivalent of the extinction of paper in judicial proceedings, and is also similar to the virtual carpet that has been operating in the field of public health for years and which allows any professional to view the entire medical file of a patient. While the state attempted to implement an administrative modernization plan that included the use of artificial intelligence, court assistants were still loading their carts with huge paper carpets. In the criminal court buildings, judges and inspectors look like airplane pilots lugging wheeled suitcases loaded with the same documents so they can continue working at home, justice files are full of paper, and photocopiers clean the paper from every rag.
A young inspector explains that he was a bit afraid of being robbed of the backpack containing the carpets he was to audit and all his confidential data. In the future, all this information will be in the cloud and accessible to you, unless due to the risk of cyber attacks, it will be secure and accessible from an authorized computer. This 21st century as indicated by the judge, according to the projections of the Ministry of Justice, will be implemented in 2027, when the government wants to finalize the activation of a new system (called EJCat+) that will begin to put the paper in the courts. States that begin in physical form will continue until they end with consequences and can be destroyed, but new states will only have a path of evolution: digital. There will be an end to photocopying, faxed notices, hand-delivery of police certificates, paper summary certificates that are in some cases copies and copies of the same original document… and the inconsistency faced by lawyers in submitting their writings via IT, such that judicial officials then have to print them out for entry into their paper files.
The process of extinguishing the paper in the courts is not new. I will start work in 2012, but it won’t be 15 years until the court suite is finished. Enjoy social media, business, and managerial adversarial games. From now on, it will reach the criminal courts, which focus on most of the matters that are dealt with in Catalonia, where pilot tests have been carried out in court and in a section of the public in Barcelona and since a few weeks ago, this test bank was moved to Tarragona, to test the interconnection between the different chambers. The EJCAT+ now available is a new standard software that promises greater performance and adaptability than the software now in operation in the rest of the jurisdictions which has the same name, but without the “+”.
“On the ground, it is an electronic file, it is a complete organizational change,” says Montserrat Reverter, Director General of the Public Service of Justice. An enthusiast of an EU-funded project, he acknowledges the complexity of venturing into one area, the criminal one, which has distinct differences with the rest of the jurisdictions: the opening of cases depends on dozens of different actors and agents (commission offices, medical centres, social workers and many others) and they all have to be safely integrated into the procedure. The ultimate difficulty is: achieving a reliable and secure system that responds to the need for this access. Therefore, says Reverter, “the system requires application support for all participants.” And then, believe me, the system will help relieve pressure on the justice system.
The Fuentes de la Fiscalía de Cataluña is not clear. One thing is the judicial collapse due to lack of juice and other technical assistance. But they believe that there is a need to take a quick step, at least, to speed up the work of inspectors and other judicial officials. And here we are, once again, in this twenty-first century that speaks of his rule. This is also the case at the IRS, where the paper minimum has disappeared. 12 years of experience in digitizing justice has not made this eventual path clear. The role never ceased to exist. According to data from the Ministry of Justice, paperwork in civil courts decreased by 61%; In lawsuits, 72%; In social fields, 56%. The files held by the Ministry of Justice today traveled 331 kilometers.
“Fuera de Cataluña, the digital medium is working,” she points out. It could be one of Clara Martínez, head of the Penal Code Department at the Colegio de la Abogacía de Barcelona. However, in his opinion, there are digital means and digital advantages. Because each independent community implements its own content, there are some that are not very useful, such as those that combine every element of a file into a distinct document, which ends up being a jumble of files in which one loses more than one finds. In other places, such as in the Basque Country, all new documents are attached to a common document. “I ask us all to understand the same system, the truth, and that the file includes a good index of documentation,” says a woman accustomed to working with her tablet, even though this digital file does not work in Catalonia. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about a system that seeks to introduce public jurisdiction is that lawyers have not been consulted about how it should work.