Publication details
The public inaccessibility of digitalized legal sources as a reason of unequal access to law and justice in the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In this presentation, I would like to introduce an overview of issues related to access to law and justice in the Czech Republic. Specifically, I would like to focus on access to digitalized legislation and court decisions, or rather the general inaccessibility of these legal sources in a digitalized form. Unlikely other European Union members, the public services in the Czech Republic fail to provide any access to the digitalized texts of the legislation and very limited access to court decisions of only a few courts. This unfortunate situation leads to a dominant position of private companies running commercial legal information systems. Additionally, it leads to a situation where not only the general public but also many public institutions are dependent on these private systems and legal sources they provide without any objective guarantee of the accuracy of this content. There have been well-known cases where a public institution has required large sums for the provision of legal sources, which they must publish by law. In this regard, I will argue the illegality of such a situation with the regard to constitutional human rights and the principle of the law that must be objectively comprehensible and accessible to be followed. Subsequently, the inevitable consequences of this situation will be mentioned. The dominant position of private companies, the financial issue of the commercial legal information systems, the unofficial content that may be misleading, the unequal market position for other subjects and last but not least, the research constraints caused by the inaccessibility of texts of legal sources all lead to unequal access to justice and deterioration of the status of the addressee of the law. The presentation will be concluded with some examples of the good practice in the digitalized publishing of the legislation and court decisions and some of my efforts to improve the access to legal sources in the Czech Republic. I will also briefly mention my own experience of teaching legal informatics and other interdisciplinary subjects to law students as a mitigation of the impact of the situation described in the presentation. |