What is the purpose of concealing data from court decisions that are publicly published?

written by Dr. Stjepan Lović, attorney, Law Firm Grubišić & Lović & Lalić

As of January 1, 2025, the Regulation on the Method of Anonymization, Publication, and Search of Anonymized Court Decisions is in effect, which prescribes the method of anonymization, publication, and search of anonymized court decisions that conclude proceedings and are publicly published on a special website. Anonymization means that certain data from publicly published court decisions are not disclosed to the public, but instead, abbreviations or initials of the participants in the proceedings are provided, making it impossible to clearly determine their identity.

The reason for the adoption of the Regulation, which consists of only 12 articles, is not the obligation to implement a specific EU regulation or the application of an EU directive in Croatian legislation, but rather the introduction of new amendments to the Law on Courts in March 2024. Article 1 of these amendments, which also came into effect on January 1, 2025, stipulates that court decisions concluding proceedings are to be publicly published on a special website following prior anonymization and compliance with personal data protection rules.

The following paragraph also stipulates the reason for the public publication and anonymization of court decisions, which is to achieve public access and transparency in the work of the courts, to enable continuous access to information about the work of the courts, and to strengthen public trust in the judiciary.

It is not a novelty

Anonymization of court decisions is not a novelty in the Croatian legal system, but the method of anonymization as prescribed by the Regulation is new. Namely, until its entry into force, court decisions were anonymized in such a way that instead of the full names and surnames of the parties, their initials and the initials of their representatives were provided, just as in the case of witnesses and other participants in court proceedings, while data from the introduction of the judgment relating to the addresses of the parties and their personal identification numbers remained undisclosed.

In this way, it was somewhat possible to conclude who the parties in the proceedings were, which contributed to the fact that the work of the court, the actions of the parties and their representatives could be subject to at least some public scrutiny. Thus, it was possible to determine the behavior of certain parties in court proceedings, their possible connection with the judge presiding over the case, and even the question of that judge’s bias, the duration of the proceedings in which those parties participated, and their actions prior to the court proceedings that necessitated the conduct of that proceeding. Such decisions, as case law, could be used in other court proceedings in which those parties did not participate, all in favor of the effort to unify judicial practice in similar or identical cases.

Complete concealment

With the new Regulation, court decisions are anonymized in such a way that it is impossible to determine who the parties and other participants in the proceedings are. For example, instead of the initials of the parties, witnesses, and other participants in the proceedings, anonymization is performed automatically, replacing the names, surnames, and nicknames of individuals with randomly selected capital letters (e.g., H, HA, HAG), whereby the algorithm selects random initials and always finds a new combination for a new person. Even the names of cadastral municipalities are concealed (if the subject of the court proceedings is real estate or the dispute is related to real estate).

Article 3 of the Regulation lists many other data that are anonymized, and interestingly, paragraph 3 of that article grants the judge presiding over the proceedings the authority to decide that certain other parts of the text of the court decision be additionally anonymized if, without such action, individuals whose identity is protected by anonymization could be identified or to prevent the disclosure of confidential data. This overly broad authority alone can lead to the abuse of anonymization of court decisions. A significant novelty of the Regulation is that it prescribes the obligation to anonymize all court decisions. Previous anonymization applied to decisions in civil, commercial, administrative, criminal, and misdemeanor proceedings.

Contrary to the principle of publicity

In announcing the entry into force of the Regulation on the Method of Anonymization, the Minister of Justice stated that this represents an important step forward in increasing legal certainty, unifying judicial practice, ensuring transparency and accessibility of court decisions to the professional and general public in Croatia. He further emphasized that the application of solutions for automatic anonymization and publication of court decisions for an open and efficient judiciary is one of the important components aimed at improving the capacities of the Croatian judiciary. The doubts that arose after the adoption of the Regulation certainly do not contribute to this.

Anonymization is also contrary to the principle of public court hearings (except in justified cases when the public is excluded), and it should be emphasized that even the European Court of Human Rights generally publishes the names of the parties in most of its judgments. It will be interesting to see how the anonymization of court decisions will affect bankruptcy proceedings and the control of the actions of participants in those proceedings. So far, all decisions have not only been non-anonymized but also publicly published – which is the correct approach that contributes to transparency and legal certainty.