Portugal's new Justice Minister, Francisca Van Dunem, has reported to parliament that there remain serious reliability problems with data output from the computerised court system.
Referring to the unreliability of statistical information available from Citius, Van Dunem pledged to continue those reforms already under way and is looking at revisiting the ‘judicial map’ masterplan introduced by her predecessor Paula Teixeira da Cruz.
"Right now we still have a problem of reliability with Citius data" said Van Dunem, speaking about the suspicious figure for the number cases waiting to be heard in Portugal’s courts.
The minister was called to parliament following an IMF document published in December 2015, which praised Portugal’s progress in the area of justice, based on data which the minister now says is suspect.
The IMF report looked at the impact of the reforms put in place as part of the country’s austerity programme between 2011 and 2014 and concluded that the most success had been seen in civil processes (injunctions, bankruptcies and insolvencies) and in the commercial courts.
Citing data from the Directorate General for Justice Policy which in turn was based on the Citius computer system, the report pointed out "striking changes" and highlighted the reduction in the number of pending cases in the courts, the resolution times of court proceedings and private debt recovery cases.
It is this information that was used as the basis for the IMF report that Francisca Van Dunem now says may still be unreliable, but “sincerely hopes that the findings in the report are true.”
MPs wanted to know what the justice minister will be doing in several areas, notably the controversial ‘judicial map’ and whether she intends to continue the reforms implemented by the previous government’s Justice Minister, Paula Teixeira da Cruz.
Francisca Van Dunem said, rather unhelpfully, that she had been invited to join a government and run a programme, not to evaluate the previous minister’s performance.
Asked about the number of trials still pending, Francisca Van Dunem said that the next set of figures drawn from the Citius computer system “will be reliable” although it is not known how she ensure reliability if the computer system itself is at fault and if there are no plans to replace or upgrade it.
One of Paula Teixeira da Cruz’s strokes of genius to reduce the highly embarrassing court case backlog simply was to ‘make disappear’ those civil cases where the accused had no assets recorded on the State’s register, such as property or vehicles.
Even this controversial and desperate move failed to make a dent in the figures but it seems now that she was helped along by a computer system that, rather conveniently, gave a rosy picture of her achievements when in fact it was ‘business as usual.’
