Publication of Court Records: Circumventing the Privacy-Transparency Trade-Off

Abstract

The open data movement is leading to the massive publishing of court records online, increasing the transparency and accessibility of justice, and enabling the advent of legal technologies building on the wealth of legal data available. However, the sensitive nature of legal decisions also raises important privacy issues. Most of the current practices address the resulting privacy / transparency trade-off by combining access control with (manual or semi-manual) text redaction. In this work, we argue that current practices are insufficient for coping with the massive access to legal data, in the sense that restrictive access control policies are detrimental to both openness and to utility while text redaction is unable to provide sound privacy protection. Thus, we advocate for a integrative approach that could benefit from the latest developments in the privacy-preserving data publishing domain. We present a detailed analysis of the problem and of the current approaches, and propose a straw man multimodal architecture paving the way to a full-fledged privacypreserving legal data publishing system.

Guidelines on electronic court filing (e-filing) and digitalisation of courts – perspective of the Council of Europe

“…The Council of Europe is one of the oldest continuously existing supra-state political organisation on the continent, founded in 1949. Established for promotion of democracy and protection of human rights and the rule of law in Europe, it comprises of 46 member states with a combined population of over 650 million people 1 . The organisation's greatest legislative achievement is represented by the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows individuals to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.…”