CNJ approves normative acts on governance for mass access to data in the Judiciary

The “Advisory Committee on Open Data and Protection of Personal Data”, in turn, will be competent to assess and propose standards for interoperability and the availability of data from court proceedings through APIs.

In September 2020, the National Council of Justice (CNJ) approved a recommendation with guidelines for the evaluation and implementation of measures aimed at the governance of access and mass use of data in the Judiciary, excluding the Supreme Federal Court. At the same time, a resolution establishing the “Advisory Committee on Open Data and Protection of Personal Data” was also approved, in order to conduct studies and submit proposals that contribute to the development and implementation of an open data policy that is harmonious with the protection of personal data in the space of the Judiciary.

The recommendation was justified in the recognition of the jurisdiction’s personal data protection needs, personality and informational self-determination of the individual, as well as the reduction of obstacles to the free development of digital markets that process and reuse legal information.

This in a scenario characterized, according to the preamble of the recommendation, by the progressive use of structured computational models for accessing and processing data made available by the Judiciary and the development of Artificial Intelligence systems aimed at systematizing information on the legal production of the courts, which provide direct benefits for spreading knowledge of the law and promoting legal certainty.

The normative act recommends, for this purpose, the availability of APIs (application programming interface, which gathers instructions and system standards that allow data integration and exchange) by the Judiciary bodies to the public so that the structured information of the existing judicial processes on their systems to be accessed in a machine-readable format; the assessment of the convenience and opportunity for charging for mass access to data, in proportion to the costs of implementing and maintaining the system, prohibited in relation to research bodies (art. 5, XVIII, LGPD); and the elaboration of rules aimed at the uniformity of identifiers and metadata to which judicial procedures refer, favoring the development of technologies that contribute to the improvement of the justice system.

The “Advisory Committee on Open Data and Protection of Personal Data”, in turn, will be competent to evaluate and propose standards for interoperability and the availability of data from court proceedings through APIs; parameters for standardization of charging for mass access; LGPD compliance measures in implementing open data policy; and initiatives to improve the criteria and metadata for storage and availability of content, following the advances in the area of ​​Artificial Intelligence applied to law.

By: Wilson Sales Belchior