ALSA 2025 meeting

In response to the low evaluation of Japan’s judicial IT system from the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report for 2017, the IT-driven civil court procedure has begun to advance. In contrast, in Indonesia, which consist of many islands, there is an urgent need to ensure access to courts for parties due to geographical difficulties in attending court, and there is a strong demand for the digitization of court procedures to improve the efficiency and speed of litigation. The digitization of court procedures is being rapidly advanced to achieve “simple, fast, and low-cost” trials as stipulated in Article 2 of the Law No. 48 of 2009 concerning Judicial Power.
　In Indonesia, due to the difficulty of revising the civil procedure law itself, the digitization of court proceeding is being promoted by revising the Supreme Court Regulation (No.1/2019). In contrast, in Japan the IT of court proceedings is being promoted gradually and cautiously through legislative amendments by the Diet. As symbolized by the phrase “to effectively and efficiently achieve fair and prompt judicial proceedings” in the opening of the report published by the government-related study group, the perspective of ensuring the fairness (the judgement’s correctness) of judicial proceedings is not lacking in the IT-based reform of judicial proceedings. The IT process of civil court proceedings is categorized into three areas (3e). Phase 1 regarding “e-Court”, involves the implementation of web conference under the previous Code of Civil Procedure (“CCP”). Phase 2 under the amendment of the CCP (Act No. 48 of 2022) enacted on May 18, 2022 (“Amended CCP”), involves the operation of procedures such as oral arguments in open court etc., via web conference. Finally, in Phase 3, the operation of “e-filing” and “e-Case Management” will be commenced.