Ksenija Puškarić: Paper Manufacturers on Life Support! First Corona, and Now Croatian Justice is Switching to Email

E-communication is being introduced to all courts in Croatia.

No, you are not mistaken, your eyes are not deceiving you, and you are not reading some old article on the Lider portal from the beginning of the last decade, but rather a current news item presented yesterday by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković to the representatives in the Croatian Parliament as part of the Government’s program that will lead Croatia for the next four years. Croatian courts, it is not exactly known when, nor how, nor how much, nor who ultimately, will soon start using emails and other software programs in their work. Paper manufacturers in the vicinity are on life support! Not only have they been crushed by Corona, but now Croatian justice is also switching to emails.

Give them water and sugar, who will they now deliver tons and tons of paper that is stuffed into drawers, cabinets, binders, attics, that mold in the hallways or are gnawed by reptiles? Who will now forget to stamp documents and pretend to have lost that one specific document, that one specific dispute, that one key paper evidence before everything important and unimportant goes into statute of limitations?

And just imagine all those judicial employees who will now, oh the agony, have to learn to use a computer for something other than surfing and scrolling through social media or playing solitaire. And once they learn all that, they must also become real hackers and learn to lose that one ‘real’ file so that something can be dragged out indefinitely. It is easy to shove paper to the bottom of a drawer, but how do you shove it into the cloud’s corner?! Our judicial employees are resourceful, they will find a way, they always do!

If this is the only reform in the justice system that awaits us in the next four years, all criminals in the country, as well as those who are yet to become one, can certainly breathe a sigh of relief, because while everyone in the system learns and gets accustomed to sending electronic messages and losing real files, all cases will end up in thick statute of limitations.

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