A cyber crime in 2018? *…Many courts had no internet connections,
reliable electricity, or even computers.*
successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/publications/transforming-courts-judicial-sector-reforms-kenya
Summarized @ foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/09/how-kenya-cleaned-up-
its-courts/
*…Many courts had no internet connections, reliable electricity, or even
computers.*
And because courts varied in their processes, it was impossible to develop
a single nationwide system without first standardizing procedures. “We
started encouraging [court] stations to develop their own local solutions,”
said Ngugi, but “this didn’t solve one of our major problems, which was
having [centralized] access to data.”
In January 2013, the judiciary’s performance management committee began to
develop a tracking tool to gather the information necessary to evaluate job
performance, which collected much of the same data an electronic case
management system would have. After almost three years of testing, the new
tool — a simple Excel spreadsheet with drop-down menus customized for each
court’s procedures, known as the Daily Court Returns Template — was rolled
out in October 2015.
At the end of the day, an administrative officer at each station would
update the spreadsheet and send a copy to the central directorate that
monitored performance, sometimes from an Internet cafe if the court lacked
a reliable Internet connection. The template allowed the directorate to
track case assignments and processing times and facilitated distribution of
caseloads. However, the tool did not allow document sharing, and it was
difficult to verify the data that court stations submitted.
Mutunga understood that greater public engagement was essential to making
reform work, and to this end he established an ombudsman’s office in
downtown Nairobi to collect and resolve citizen complaints. Ideally,
citizens would be able to bring their complaints to the office, call, send
text messages, letters, or emails. Staff logged complaints and set
deadlines for a response in a database used by liaison officers at each
court station. After receiving an alert from the database, liaison officers
had to resolve the problem or provide an explanation within the allotted
time. Inadequate responses or patterns of complaints could be grounds for
disciplinary action against judges and administrative staff.
However, getting citizens to use the resource was a challenge. Kennedy
Bidali, the first ombudsman, believed his team received only a fraction of
the complaints they could have helped address. “We’ve tried the usual,” he
said — from appearing on radio and television programs to distributing
written materials and T-shirts — “but it’s not sufficient, and it’s not
easy.”
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