- Court officials express concern over potential technology failures impacting court operations.
After the IT failure in the North Rhine-Westphalian legal system about three weeks ago, the New Judges Association anticipates more of such incidents. Due to this outage, files couldn't be handled, and trials couldn't be conducted, according to the association's statement. Since then, it's been quite chaotic: "Every day, we're faced with error messages regarding local or even statewide IT breakdowns, leading to extended processing times in every judicial branch."
Given the imminent funding cuts to the justice sector, prolonged outages might become the norm in the near future. The budget for maintaining a reliable IT infrastructure is no longer provided.
In an urgent letter to North Rhine-Westphalia's Minister of Justice, Benjamin Limbach (Green Party), in April, the heads of the higher regional courts and the state prosecutors general cautioned that these budget cuts could potentially jeopardize the judiciary's operation and consequently, the rule of law.
To date, this appeal has been ignored. "The indifference is alarming given the escalating difficulties the judiciary is encountering, not just due to surging hate crimes and violent acts, as well as increasing asylum proceedings," stresses the judges' association.
The funding cuts to the justice sector could lead to more frequent IT failures, potentially making incidents like the recent one with justice becoming the norm. This disregard for the judiciary's IT infrastructure threatens the smooth operation of the rule of law.
