22 November 2022 – dr Wiśniewska & dr Szwed – European Court of Human Rights – does it inspire or block the development of new technologies in the justice system?
Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to a fair trial, is the primary theme of applications submitted to the Strasbourg Court. Many of the allegations made by applicants in their submissions based on Article 6 ECHR are directly or indirectly related to the organisation of the justice system. These circumstances, among other things, lead to the emergence of many ideas for changes in justice. One of such ideas is far-reaching digitisation and computerisation.
The idea of digital transformation can be considered an easy and quick way to reform the justice system, especially in the face of the increasingly faster and dynamic development of technology in all areas of our lives. The slow uptake of digitisation in judicial systems of many European countries shows that the above conclusion may, to a certain extent, be premature. On the other hand, the experience of the time of the pandemic may suggest that the implementation of certain solutions was delayed.
Guests of our Seminar dr Katarzyna Wiśniewska and dr Marcin Szwed attempted to answer the question posed in its title, i.e. whether judges and decision-makers should treat the case law of the European Court of Human Rights more as an impulse to further digitization and digital transformation of the judiciary or rather see as a red line that must not be crossed.
Dr Katarzyna Wiśniewska is an expert in EU procedural rights and proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in human rights strategic litigation. She has been involved in European and international research projects in the area of criminal procedure and human rights law. She defended her PhD thesis in the Department of Penal Law at the Jagiellonian University. In 2010-2021 she worked as a lawyer and project coordinator in the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights – a nongovernmental organization based in Poland. In 2015 – 2021 she was the Director of the Strategic Litigation Programme at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.
From October 2021 to May 2022 she was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg in the area of European Criminal Law. Currently, she is cooperating with the Free Court Foundation.
Dr Marcin Szwed is a coordinator of the Strategic Litigation Programme of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Dr Szwed completed a programme in American law at the Center for American Law Studies, a joint undertaking of the Faculty of Law and the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He also finished an LLM programme in comparative constitutional law at the Central European University in Budapest. Dr Szwed is an assistant professor at the Department of Constitutional Law of the Faculty of Law at the University of Warsaw. He has written many publications on human rights and constitutional law. He is an expert in constitutional law and international mechanisms for human rights protection.
