Digital court registry crashes…No back-up system available

Feb 03, 2020 News

With no backup system available, litigants and court officials alike are feeling the effects of a crash to the digital system at the registry of the Georgetown Supreme Court.
Kaieteur News understands that the system has been experiencing technical problems since last November.

Georgetown Supreme Court.

While it is unclear what caused the problems, sources close to the registry have said with no backup system in place, the Court may be faced with a situation in which numerous court records are lost.
Attorney- at- law, Sanjeev Datadin spoke of the difficulties he encountered trying to retrieve information from the registry recently.
Datadin, who is representing Kaieteur News in several libel cases brought against the newspaper by former Head of the National Industrial Commercial Investments, (NICIL) Winston Brassington, noted that the shutdown has made it impossible for him to retrieve information from the registry on the case.
“All my efforts have been unsuccessful at this point and I don’t believe the registry can retrieve those documents,” Datadin said.
The lawyer said too he is not aware that the court has sent out any official notice on how it is dealing with the problem.
The attorney noted that he is uncertain how many other cases are affected by the shutdown.
The attorney stressed on the need for some explanation from the Court on how the matter will be addressed. He said he is also unsure whether the Bar Association of Guyana has been notified.
“At this time to my knowledge, the Court’s Registrar has not officially engaged anyone on the way forward, “he said.
In 2017, the digital system was introduced to improve the effectiveness of the Court process.
Along with the implementation of Civil Procedure Rules 2016, the voice recognition systems and the digital registry came on stream.
This represented a major step towards reducing the number of cases which go to court, as well as curbing long delays in the hearing of civil litigation cases.
This digital featured voice recognition systems which would have significantly eased the burden on judicial officers with regards to recording the end of trials.
The objective of the new system was to put an end to the need for judges to write notes in longhand, and has been in operation since the opening of the new session of the Demerara Criminal Assizes.