With the country’s border controls already grappling with the logistical nightmare of a new EU entry/ exit system, the court system has now been thrown into (further) chaos, with the introduction of a ‘new computer system’.
The new system has managed to ‘lose’ urgent cases, and send others ‘to the wrong judges’.
The country’s court system generally is notorious for delays, but this latest curved ball is creating “chaos” in the administrative and tax courts. Thus, this morning, an emergency meeting will be held with the Secretary of State for Justice, Ana Luísa Machado – a relative new face in government who arrives from the Institute for Financial Management and Equipment of Justice (IGFEJ), where she was president.
The meeting has been requested by the Superior Council of Administrative and Tax Courts (CSTAF), which intends to “demand total resolution of the problem by next week”.
Failing that possibility, CSTAF is said to seek “the immediate suspension of the computer system migration process, the reactivation of the jurisdiction’s previous system ( ‘the old SITAF’), and a gradual advance in the migration process, with the creation of a pilot project with just one court”.
This nightmare is also affecting the Public Prosecutor’s Office, adds Lusa.
The ‘new computer system’ was put abruptly in place nine days ago, when the old system was simply ‘switched off’.
Since that moment, courts have had a single computer system for processing cases, with the IGFEJ migrating from SITAF (the previous system for administrative and tax courts) to Citius – designed as the ‘unique access point for justice professionals, citizens and businesses’.
Lusa adds that although migration is to a single system, access is via different interfaces, depending on the user’s procedural status: public prosecutors use MPCODEX, and judges use MAGISTRATUS.
“In both cases, nothing is working as it should”.
Lusa has been hearing complaints from the prosecutor of the Administrative and Fiscal Court of Viseu and treasurer of the national board of the Union of Public Prosecutors (SMMP) Susana Moura, and the secretary judge of the Superior Council of Administrative and Fiscal Courts (CSTAF), judge Eliana de Almeida Pinto.
Cases lost in the migration process, which have been slowly being recovered for a week now, loss of access to consult their own cases and those of colleagues, lawyers excluded from cases, the impossibility of entering procedural documents into the system, requests for lawyers to submit paper cases to the court offices – contrary to the law – loss of computer tools in the new system that are essential for carrying out their duties, are just some examples of the new day-to-day life in the court system since the migration of systems.
“Chaos has ensued. We have no security in what we’re doing,” Susana Moura explains, criticising the IGFEJ’s lack of response and the ‘process of reporting failure after failure without anything actually being resolved’.
Eliana Pinto said that in April, when the migration was announced, CSTAF ‘diligently decided to set up a task force to monitor the process’ with the IGFEJ. Several meetings took place, and tests were carried out, which apparently showed no flaws.
“Apparently, everything was safeguarded. We pointed out that there were procedures specific to the jurisdiction that had to be taken care of in the new computer system. Absolute chaos has ensued in the jurisdiction. Some cases have disappeared, there are cases from the Supreme Administrative Court (STA) that have ended up in courts of first instance,” she tells Lusa.
Now the South Central Administrative Court has announced that trial sessions scheduled for tomorrow will not take place due to constraints.
Eliana Pinto also warns that thousands of cases relating to the regularisation of migrants in Portugal, the so-called AIMA cases (Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) appear in the system assigned to the wrong section, which if not corrected in the computer system could mean that the judges in that section have to produce an order for each one of them, referring them to the correct section and judge.
“There are 140,000 orders, that’s impractical,” she said, in perhaps the understatement of the day.
Recalling that the state is a defendant in a number of administrative and tax cases, Eliana Pinto also pointed out that the government is effectively jeopardising the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
Source: LUSA
