Digital justice: Creating e-courts in Kurdistan

Sulaymaniyah City, Kurdistan © Diyar Muhammed/Wikimedia Commons

In 2016, the Sulaymaniyah Province in Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan adopted an electronic case management system to expedite its court proceedings.

According to Alan Awilkadir, who coordinated the project, filing a case used to take up a whole day, with people queuing from one window to the next. “Now it can be done in minutes,” he told Capacity4dev during this year’s European Development Days.

The Sulaymaniyah Province is home to two million people and has 31 different courts, including civil, criminal and appeal courts. According to Awilkadir, a traditional paper-based system has proven to be too inefficient for the province’s needs.

“After each court case, you have to archive all the paperwork,” he said. “Eventually, we ended up with more than three million documents, making it impossible to search through them in case we ever had to.”

Now, he added, “we can query what we’re looking for, and have the results in a few seconds.”

The Kurdistan Electronic Court project was developed with the help of several Estonian companies, winners of a tender announced by the regional government of Kurdistan in 2014.

In Sulaymaniyah, the companies built the entire system from ground up, setting up server rooms and cabling, and providing training. It took two years to complete the project.

“The digitalisation of justice equals improved rule of law,” said Priit Kongo, CEO of Net Group, one of the companies involved in the project. “As the country becomes more transparent, businesses are more likely to invest in it, thanks to clearer processes.”

According to Awilkadir, shifting people’s mind-set proved one of the biggest challenges in implementing the electronic system.

“In any cultural change, people are reluctant to give up the things they’re used to, so there was some resistance, but we were able to convince everyone of the benefits through discussion and explanation,” he said. “The ability to communicate efficiently is critical and you have to be patient in convincing people. This something new for all of us.”

In the following video, Alan A. Awilkadir and Priit Kongo briefly explain the advantages of e-court technology.