Computerization Project

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The Judiciary with support from Investment Climate Facility for Africa (ICF) has been working on a number of interventions aimed at addressing some of challenges the institution has been facing.

Digitalization of Court Case Records

Digitalization of court records is an intervention aimed at addressing issues of missing court case records. With this intervention, every physical record has an equivalent electronic version which can be reproduced should the physical file go missing.

This has significantly reduced complaints of missing case records in jurisdictions where this system has been deployed.

A total of 113,831 case records have so far been scanned representing over 1.9 million individual court documents across three (3) jurisdictions.

The table below highlight court registries that have been computerized as at 31^st December 2019:

Lusaka

	Registry	Records Scanned
1.	Supreme Court Civil Registry	5,276
2.	Supreme Court Criminal Registry	1,601
3.	Constitutional Court Registry	170
4.	Court of Appeal Civil Registry	1,683
5.	Court of Appeal Criminal Registry	637
6.	High Court Commercial Registry	7,178
7.	High Court Principal Registry	31,868
8.	High Court Criminal Registry	5,462
9.	High Court Industrial Relations Division Registry	2,652
10.	High Court Family Division Registry	1,884
11.	Subordinate Court Civil Registry	19,044
12.	Subordinate Court Criminal Registry	18,825
13.	Small Claims Registry	2,082

Kitwe

	Registry	Records Scanned
1.	High Court Civil Registry	6,642
2.	High Court Criminal Registry	985
3.	High Court Commercial Registry	133

Ndola

	Registry	Records Scanned
1.	High Court Civil Registry	5,898
2.	High Court Criminal Registry	1,811

Computerization of Court Rooms

The institution has embarked on a programme aimed at equipping court rooms with state-of-the-art equipment in an effort to increase transparency and boost public confidence.

Each computerized courtroom has the following installed equipment:

Projector: Used to display court exhibits to public gallery;

LCD Screens: Used to display proceedings and exhibits to the bench and the bar;

Public Address System: Consisting of microphones, speakers, mixers and amplifiers used to increase audibility in the court;

Audio Recorder: Used to record court proceedings;

Computer: Used for submission of electronic exhibits in various formats on CD, DVD, USB Drives or SD Cards;

Document Camera: Used to capture, display and present physical exhibits in court;

Annotation Monitor: Used to visually highlight important aspects of exhibits being presented in court.

Self-Service Kiosks, Causelist Displays and Electronic Attendance Systems have also been implemented in some stations

The following are the courtrooms that have computerized under this programme:

Lusaka

Supreme Court – 2 Courtrooms

High Court – 4 Courtrooms

Magistrate Court Complex – 2 Courtrooms

Industrial Relations Court – 1 Courtroom

Kitwe

High Court – 2 Courtrooms

Ndola

High Court – 1 Courtroom

Magistrates Court – 1 Courtroom

Realtime Court Reporting

The institution has recruited eighty three (83) university graduates and trained them as real-time court reporters to take down court proceedings using state-of-the-art text recording equipment.

This has significantly reduced the lead-time it used to take adjudicators to write judgments as proceedings taken in court are now made available just hours after hearing.

Previously, proceedings were handwritten and in most cases took several weeks to transcribe and error-correct before they were made available to adjudicators.