Starting next year, Belgium will electronically manage rulings, judgements and other documents related to court cases. The country’s Justice Minister in November also announced plans to allow judges to electronically create, sign and send rulings and judgements.
Additionally, the minister wants to allow notaries to be able to submit electronically the paperwork required to set up or change the status of companies.
The Ministry of Justice is running multiple projects to digitise and digitalise the workflow in all Justice related services, departments and organisations. One example is the VAJA database (Vonnissen en Arresten, Jugements et Arrêts - Judgements), a project that started in 2014. Since the beginning of 2015, all judgements by courts of appeal and labour courts have been included in this data bank.
As of early December this year the database contained over 125,000 judgements. The system now also automatically alerts lawyers, sending them an immediate copy of judgements. VAJA, in combination with other projects, has already lowered postage costs by some 14 %.
Reduce postage costs
Another example is E-Deposit, a solution that allows the electronic submission of legal documents. This has been implemented for all courts of appeal and labour courts in 2015. This year, the solution became available for all commerce courts, and for Courts of First Instance in Antwerp, Namur, Liège and Ghent. To date, the system has been used to submit 68,000 documents. In October this year, nearly 38 % of legal conclusions were submitted digitally, using E-Deposit.
A third project, E-Box, aims to replace paper-based communication in the Ministry of Justice with an electronic document workflow. The system can handle unstructured information, including (registered) letters. Messages sent by E-Box have the same legal status as registered mail. The Ministry hopes E-Box will help reduce annual postage costs, which currently exceed EUR 20 million. At the moment, E-Box is being used by district courts and the national gazette.
A fourth project, Consult-online, allows authenticated users to use a computer in courts and prisons to view criminal records. The system is already being used in the districts of Arlon, Marche-en-Famenne and Brussels, giving prisoners and their lawyers access to their records. Like the other projects, Consult-online aims to lower costs, as it is no longer necessary to transport records to prisons.