The Rwanda Bar Association has hailed the new system of integrated electronic management of court cases as time saving and expected to reduce delays and transaction costs associated with judicial cases.

The Ministry of Justice, in conjunction with the Justice Law and Order Sector (JLOS), introduced the system effective January 1.

Announcing the development last week, Johnston Busingye, the minister for justice, said the initiative marks the achievement of goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which calls for building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions while providing access to justice for all.

"The aim of Goal 16 on the SDGs has been achieved through this system. This is a special achievement for Rwanda. In Africa, we are the first to have this system. We are looking forward for our trained personnel to train other African countries which don’t have this system in case they request,” he said.

Developing the web-based system, which will be accessible from anywhere with internet connectivity, cost $1.6 million (about Rwf1.2 billion).

It was designed within a period of 22 months by an American company, Synergy International System.

The justice sector has trained staff in its use and maintenance.

Eight IT staff underwent seven-week training in Armenia to maintain the system, 40 staff have been trained to administer it, and other 40 were trained to train other end users.

The training of end users started within the City of Kigali and is expected to continue countrywide.

Expected benefits of the system

In an interview with The New Times yesterday, Julien Kavaruganda, the Rwanda Bar Association president, said the system would improve service delivery in the judicial sector.

"It will ease work for clients who will easily follow their cases from their homes. It will also ease lawyers’ work since they can access needed information from their offices. It is time saving, efficient and it will be of benefit,” she said.

Information from the Ministry of Justice indicates that the system will reduce the costs incurred by the public in filing, processing and monitoring of cases, whereby transport and time costs will be minimised in terms of movement of clients from institution to institution, office to office.

It will also facilitate regular update of the case progress by e-mail, (case hearing and scheduling).

For instance, a client who wants to check his file or his day of hearing will obtain the needed information through this system.

In regard to the government, the system will provide logical grouping of justice sector institutions through a computerised justice sector common working platform for better, fast and cheaper judicial service delivery to the citizens, the official explained.

It will bring unlimited full time access to official work and documents for officials of the justice sector from anywhere, including centralising unique data base for all justice sector institutions, automatic archiving and easy referencing of judicial documents, easy document tracking and workflow management.

The system will also reduce the duplication of data collection and processing, ease access and sharing of information and data among officials in the justice sector, monitoring of the performance of judicial officials.

It will also deliver notifications and reminders to officials to ensure that they do the right actions at the right time.

In addition, it will ease the retrieval of litigants information from other systems, reduce costs associated with use of papers (since it is online) while giving accurate reports for decision makers.

The system will be integrated with other government institutions such as the National ID Agency, specifically for individual identification, Rwanda Revenue Authority for individual vehicle information, and Rwanda Natural Resource Authority for individual’s land information.

It is expected to be later rolled out to other parts of the country.

According to justice officials, the system will be upgraded to involve other features like fingerprints for easy identification of suspects and electronic signature and stamping to make it fully paperless.

editorial@newtimes.co.rw