Writing America, 22 feb. Collapsed offices, judges with 900 cases to read and people waiting for their judicial situation to be resolved are some of the examples of judicial congestion in Latin America, a situation that has forced countries like Mexico or Colombia to promote digitization.
In some nations of the region, a judicial process takes an average of more than 600 days to resolve, while in the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the average is 240 days, according to data from the Inter-American Bank of Development (IDB).
In Colombia the situation goes further and “the judges cannot cope with the number of processes they are in charge of. The processes start but take between 5 to 4 years, which makes congestion a big problem,” explained criminal lawyer Milton Perdomo, director of Human Rights at the Fundación Retorno a la Libertad.
Judicial decongestion is one of the constant requests from the public and private sectors to governments, as well as the allocation of resources to reduce the costs and duration of the procedures.
“Several governments in the region are developing very timely initiatives, especially high digital transformation,” said José Fernando Quintero, regional director of Public Administrations at Minsait, a company of the Spanish firm Indra that is committed to transformation and innovation. to improve procedures, processes or proceedings through digitization.
According to the 2022 “Rule of Law” index, from the World Justice Project organization and which measures the rule of law and the perception of Justice, in the region the level of trust in the judicial system fell by 61%, due to the continuous delays , weak law enforcement and discrimination.
COLOMBIA, BETWEEN DAMS AND PROGRESS
The Justice Congestion Index in Colombia of the Superior Council of the Judiciary indicated that by 2021 the level of judicial congestion was 57.5%.
“The municipal courts today are crammed with processes such as lack of food assistance and intrafamily violence, so much so that one of the points of the judicial reform project of this government (of the leftist Gustavo Petro) is to decriminalize lack of food assistance because it does not prevent crime and does not there is effectiveness in the processes”, assures Perdomo.
The judicial imprisonment also generates an impact on the victims, due to the costs of paying a lawyer, and on persons deprived of their liberty, whose situation should be resolved with a sentence in the first instance in a maximum of 330 days, but it takes up to ” 28 or 30 months without issuing a sentence, so they must release him due to the expiration of terms.”
The pandemic also “forced us to use (digital) tools to process the processes,” he said, noting that the challenges are great at a structural level, such as generating more interconnectivity to bridge the gap in municipalities in the country when holding hearings or consulting prisoners about their trials.
MEXICO AND ITS PASS TO DIGITALIZATION
For Laurence Pantin, coordinator of the Transparency in Justice program of México Evalúa, although there are difficulties, great steps have been taken with digitization, in a country where there are 33 local and one federal judiciaries.
“Many judiciaries that did not have technologies made an effort to expand what they already had (…) and now we can see how some are at the forefront and others are far behind,” Pantin said.
The state of Nuevo León is an example of digitization, with virtual audiences or in hybrid mode.
In many municipalities in Mexico there is a digital divide, for which solutions are being sought such as “offering people access to a computer connected to the Internet within their facilities,” Pantin explained.
DIGITAL MODERNIZATION, A NEED
Given this panorama, the regional director of Public Administrations of Minsait pointed out that it is time for the region to have an “effective modernization of its judicial systems”, since the lack of resources, bureaucracy or corruption make the path to digitalization difficult.
“We lack speed in the initiatives (…), what is required is to move from the consultative exercise to an exercise of application of these new models that are proactive, integrable and efficient,” he said.
Quintero believes that in “large process management systems” that comply with the rules and have the ideal conditions, “technology is a primary enabler.”
DIGITAL JUSTICE
Among Minsait’s developments is cognitive digital justice, which recognizes documents with artificial intelligence, where thousands of portfolios are reduced to electronic documents.
A virtual briefcase for the judge in which “you can search for information faster”, for example files, leaving behind the image of the desktop with thousands of pages to read.
Added to this are virtual hearings, electronic files, first-level centralized systems or the interconnection of courts.
In addition to a high level of data protection, Quintero mentioned that through cybersecurity operations centers in several countries in the region, such as Colombia, the data is secured.
Finally, both Perdomo and Pantin pointed out that with digitization, technology will be at the service of judges and people by receiving humane, close and transparent treatment.
