Hindrances to open government in brazilian federal justice

Abstract

Promising more agility and transparency to lawsuit procedures, Judicial Branch, in a context of open government and access to justice, through the last decade, has been implementing electronic case filing to enhance its management activities. Aiming to analyze to what extent this is effective in practice, we sought to verify, by means of a case study on Brazilian Federal Justice scope, the hindrances to obtain access to judicial process data and information. This analysis considered: agility in returning solicitations; diversity of internal organs requested; degree of informatization of electronic case filing; transparency in returning requests; and bureaucracy involved on handling requests. The difficulties in accessing data of judicial files, to the application of Access to Information Act, as well as the slow and chaotic informatization show that there is still considerable distance between courts reality and regulation advances.