The court goes online – Newspaper Kommersant No. 234 (7435) dated 12/16/2022

Participants of the round table of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation and State Building discussed on Thursday the prospects for e-justice. At the event, in particular, it turned out that lawyers do not have enough “Electronic Guard” to track the claims filed against them by citizens, and prosecutors lack crypto wallets for confiscated digital assets. In addition, the introduction of an online court will not rid the judiciary of its inherent flaws, experts warned.

The new information platform “Justice Online” will start working in 2024. But some of the functions of the super service, including filing and receiving court documents online in civil and administrative processes, may start operating in the near future. Irina Dobrynina, Deputy Head of the Department of Informatization of the Judicial Department under the Supreme Court, announced this on December 15, speaking at a round table dedicated to the development of e-justice in the Federation Council. According to her, the courts have already done their part of the work, and now the Ministry of Digital Transformation is developing templates and interactive forms, as soon as they are ready, the courts will start launching a new service.

Ms. Dobrynina also recalled that in the near future the legislator intends to expand the use of online technologies in criminal proceedings, but the possibilities of using remote services are still limited. Although web-conferencing sessions have performed well during the pandemic, such a practice will not be widely adopted due to the fact that a law passed last year requires biometric authentication of participants in the process, the official explained. The commissioning of a unified biometric system by the Ministry of Digital Development is planned for the end of 2023, and based on the results of this work, it will be possible to introduce a remote process, she added.

Nevertheless, in ten months of 2022, 4.5 million documents were submitted to the Russian courts in electronic form, said Aleksey Solokhin, Advisor to the Department for Systematization of Legislation and Analysis of Judicial Practice of the Supreme Court. During the same time, according to him, more than 350,000 court hearings were held via videoconferencing and more than 300,000 via web communications.

However, digitalization not only opens up new opportunities, but also reveals existing problems. Elena Avakyan, Vice-President of the Federal Chamber of Lawyers, drew attention to the inherent flaws of judicial information systems, for example, the lack of a single bank of decisions of courts of general jurisdiction and the possibility of text search on them. To assess the practice on a particular issue, analysts need several days and “go through” all the decisions of all courts, Ms. Avakyan complained. Not to mention the fact that only a tenth of all decisions made are posted in the reference and information system. She also noted that so far nothing prevents judges of general jurisdiction from backdating their decisions, although the technology has already been implemented in the electronic file cabinet of arbitration cases, thanks to which all terms are calculated only from the moment the decision is published. Finally, the absence of the Electronic Guard service in the system of general jurisdiction creates serious risks for citizens of loss of income due to uncontrolled filing of lawsuits against them, Elena Avakyan summed up.

Associate Professor of the Russian Customs Academy Marianna Rumyantseva, in turn, drew attention to the fact that the introduction of an electronic process calls into question the publicity and openness of justice: if anyone can come to a regular trial, then what to do with an online meeting is unclear.

But the prosecutors, as it turned out, are most concerned about the issues of confiscation of cryptocurrencies. The supervisory agency consistently advocates recognizing digital financial assets as property that can become the subject of criminal encroachments, this will make it possible to confiscate such assets during criminal proceedings, Madina Dolgieva, prosecutor of the Main Judicial Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office, reminded the participants of the round table. According to her, the courts are still making conflicting decisions: some recognize cryptocurrency as property, others do not. However, the prosecutor admitted, the confiscation of a material carrier with a virtual asset is half the battle, it still needs to be cashed out somehow. And here the biggest problems begin: there are no registered cryptocurrency exchanges in Russia, and the prosecutor’s office cannot apply to foreign ones, Ms. Dolgieva complained. Therefore, the prosecutor’s office considers it necessary to allow the investigating authorities to start their own crypto-wallets and cash out the cryptocurrency, the turnover of which has increased sharply after the introduction of restrictions on the withdrawal of currency abroad in February this year.

Anastasia Kornya