ICT Lessons from ICC for Kenya’s judiciary

 

PHOTO | FILE A Foton showroom in Nairobi.  NATION MEDIA GROUP

In Summary

• The defence lawyer strategy was simply to run down the clock on the witnesses – who would eventually drop out due to fatigue, attrition and other factors.
• Worse still, this case gets stuck between being mentioned, being heard and most commonly being adjourned for all manner of reasons.

By John Walubengo
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No doubt the drama at the International Criminal Court has captured and arrested our collective imaginations.

The obvious center of attention being the prosecution and the defence lawyers as they convince the judges one way or the other.

But within the same court room, one cannot avoid to see the high-tech nature of the proceedings. All participants – judges, lawyers, court clerks and even the accused – seem to enjoy the elaborate ICT support availed in the courtroom.

Snap your thoughts away from The Hague; and into the Kenyan courtroom. Imagine you have a court case in our best court room at Milimani Courts, Nairobi. What exactly will you go through? As willing witness to some civil suit, here is what I went through.

Four years ago I received the manual summons to appear in court as a witness to the suit. These were hand-delivered by the CID investigator/prosecutor and for reasons given below – I continue to receive them to-date. From the outset why not digitally serve the summons to appear?

SCRIBBLING

On the appointment day and 8AM sharp I arrive at the court and spend some time in the corridors of justice looking for the designated court room. By 8.15AM am seated and await for the magistrate to commence the court proceedings.

The magistrate arrives at 10.30AM, having been preceded by the prosecutor, defence lawyers and court clerk – all of them carrying huge amounts of manual files. Magistrate then begins handling one court cases after the other, scribbling furiously all the way before my case is mentioned at around 12pm.

Why all the scribbling? Why not delegate all that to a digital transcriber to do it in real-time so that you focus on hearing rather than scribbling the case?

For the next four years, this will be repeated – get manual summons, get to court early, magistrate and team arrive later under a heavy load of manual files to do more scribbling.

Worse still, this case gets stuck between being mentioned, being heard and most commonly being adjourned for all manner of reasons.

Some of the reasons like seeking adjournment because defendant got a new lawyer who needed time to study the file was repeatedly used and abused. The poor magistrate had no way of telling from the heap of manual files that this line of argument was being repeatedly abused by the defence to stall the case.

STRATEGY

The defence lawyer strategy was simply to run down the clock on the witnesses – who would eventually drop out due to fatigue, attrition and other factors. Furthermore, given the manual system, the magistrate had no sense of telling which cases were dragging and getting bypassed on the queue by newer, perhaps less urgent cases.

Meanwhile, the Chief Justice who is the magistrate's boss is also not having timely performance statistics on the number of cases, their nature, outcomes and the duration that each magistrate or judge is taking to hear and determine cases.

The solution to all these challenges is for the Kenyan Judiciary to implement a Court Case Management System (CCMS) - similar to what is implemented at The Hague. Such a system will integrate the roles of Chief Justice, magistrate, prosecution, defense, witness and accused in one digital platform – enabling each to efficiently monitor and improve on their performance indicators.