Latest Judgepedia contribution:
Supreme Court of the United States
Denial of due process notice and service and public access to judicial records, to inspect and to copy
The right for Due Process notice and service of judicial decisions is well established in US law as a fundamental Civil Right. Likewise, the right for notice and service of judicial decisions is part of the Human Right for Fair Hearing.
The common law right of public access to judicial records, to inspect and to copy, was re-affirmed by the Supreme Court in Nixon v. Warner Communications, Inc., 435 U.S. 589 (1978), as inherent to the First, Sixth, and Fifth/Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
In recent years, computerized case management and public access systems have been implemented in the Supreme Court. There is no doubt that such systems could have enhanced the validity, integrity, and transparency of judicial records. However, in parallel to the implementation of such systems, it has been documented that individuals received only notice of judicial decisions in petitions and application, but no service of any judicial records of the decisions themselves. In addition, repeated attempts failed to discover the corresponding judicial records in the paper court files of the Supreme Court failed, to the degree that access to the paper court files was permitted. Requests to access the corresponding electronic judicial records of the Supreme Court were uniformly denied. [11]
Therefore, in parallel to the implementation of computerized case management and public access system in the Supreme Court, conditions have been created, where no access is permitted to judicial records to both parties and the public at large.
Reports of the United Nations Drug Control and Crime Prevention Center, pertaining to strengthening of judicial integrity against corruption:
- Call for the implementation of electronic system to enhance public access to judicial records, [12]and
- List missing judicial records as an indicator of judicial corruption. [13]
The lack of transparency and the absence of comprehensive and regularly updated databases further worsen the effects of corruption in the judiciary. Such situations easily lend themselves to inconsistencies in the application of the law and make it much more difficult to identify patterns, trends or individual cases in which incorrect or anomalous results suggest the possibility of corruption.
...
Indicators of corruption, as perceived by the public, include: ... lack of public access to records of court proceedings; disappearance of files...
References
- ↑ Request for Impeachment of US Supreme Court Clerk WILLIAM SUTER, Human Rights Alert, January 25, 2011
- ↑ Report of the First Meeting of the Judicial Group on Strengthening Judicial Integrity,CICP-6 (p 5), United Nations Drug Control and Crime Prevention Center, 2000
- ↑ Strengthening Judicial Integrity,CICP-10 (p 6), United Nations Drug Control and Crime Prevention Center, 2001
No comments:
Post a Comment