Зміст

The Unified Judicial Information and Telecommunication System — UJITS — is not a single piece of software. It is more than twenty subsystems that together are meant to cover the whole life of a court case, from filing a claim to enforcing the judgment. Some have been running for years. Some exist only on paper, in technical specifications. A few, though required by law, still do not exist at all.

What follows is a tour of the components involved in this work, and why each one matters. Not how they are built inside — what they change for the person who walks into a courtroom.

The parts a litigant actually sees

E-Court handles filing. Claims, appeals, motions, evidence — submitted electronically. No queues, no postal delays, no risk of a document disappearing somewhere between two registries.

The Electronic Cabinet is the litigant’s own space. Summonses arrive there, case materials are available, the movement of documents is visible. It replaces the phone call to the court office asking what, if anything, has happened to your case.

For people in small towns, people with disabilities, and people who left the country because of the war, these two matter more than anything else on this list. Showing up in person can cost them days and money out of proportion to the case — and sometimes it is simply not possible.

Video conferencing allows remote participation in hearings. Under wartime conditions this is not a convenience. When a court has been relocated, when a party is near the front line or abroad, when travel is dangerous, it is often the only way the right to be heard survives at all.

The Judiciary of Ukraine web portal and the eSud mobile app are the public front doors: information about courts, hearing schedules, services from a phone.

The Unified State Register of Court Decisions may be the single most important piece of openness here. Anyone can read the judgment in their own case and in any other, see how courts interpret the law, and compare approaches. It underpins legal practice, academic research and public scrutiny alike.

Impartiality: automated case assignment

Automated case assignment is a separate strand of the work. On paper it is a technical procedure that decides which judge gets which case. In practice it is one of the main safeguards against influence over the outcome.

If assignment can be bypassed or quietly adjusted by hand, everything else loses its value — the judge’s qualifications, the procedural guarantees, the open register of decisions. So the work covered all three layers: the concept of how assignment should work, the functional requirements for the subsystem, and the changes to the rules governing it.

A related strand is extraterritorial assignment — moving cases between courts in different regions. It relieves overloaded courts, and it answers situations where a case cannot credibly be heard where it started.

Talking to the rest of the state

Electronic exchange with state registers lets a court obtain information directly instead of requesting it by letter for weeks: property, vehicles, registered address, income, criminal record.

The effect runs two ways. Cases move faster — a real-time query instead of months of correspondence. And the burden on the litigant drops: state bodies exchange what they already hold, rather than sending a person out to collect certificates on their behalf.

The Register of Enforcement Documents closes the last stage — enforcement. A judgment that cannot be enforced does not resolve the dispute, which makes this block as important as the hearing itself.

The machinery behind the counter

Litigants never see these subsystems, but how well a court works depends on them.

Document management and the electronic records system handle the internal flow of documents in courts and judicial bodies.

The judicial dossier holds structured information about each judge: career, qualification assessment, disciplinary record, declarations. A working tool for judicial governance bodies, and a transparency measure in selection.

HR and budget modules cover staffing and expenditure planning across the whole system. Transparency here translates directly into whether courts have the people and resources they need.

The contact centre is meant to be the single point to ask for help. Required by regulation, and for a long time simply absent.

The foundations

Core services, infrastructure and access rights management are the base layer: who can reach what, how systems recognise a user, how they exchange data with one another.

It reads as a purely engineering topic, but it has a direct legal dimension. This is where it is decided whether an outsider can see the materials of someone else’s case — and whether it will later be possible to establish who did what in the system.

APIs let external services plug in — from law-firm software to state platforms — without rebuilding the system each time.

Data and analysis

Open judiciary data is anonymised statistics on caseload, timeframes and outcomes. It makes it possible to judge the system by numbers rather than impressions — and to do so from the outside, not only from within.

Analytical tools turn that data into something you can act on: where delays accumulate, which categories of cases are problematic, how the workload is spread across courts.

Artificial intelligence was handled as a strand of its own: analysis of case law, synthesis of legal positions, support for routine decisions. One line matters more than any other here. AI can prepare material and find patterns; it does not decide cases and does not stand in for a judge. That limit belongs in the rules of use, not in a statement of intent.

What the work consisted of

Audits. Independent checks on the state of the systems: whether they do what they claim, whether documentation exists, whether support and security are in place, whether the system can be developed further. The audits covered individual modules as well as cross-cutting areas — hardware, maintenance, testing, information security.

Technical requirements. Reviewing the documents systems are built from. This is the point where the outcome can still be changed: if requirements are vague, or ignore how a court actually works, the fix comes later, on a finished product — slower and more expensive.

Regulation. The UJITS Regulation and amendments to it. A technical system without a legal basis carries no legal weight: an electronic document has to count for exactly as much as a paper one, and the procedure has to be written so that every court applies it the same way.

Concepts and strategy. What the system should become, in what order it should be built, and how that connects to the state’s rule-of-law commitments.

Why any of this matters

Digitalising justice is usually pitched as a convenience story. It is really about three things that matter considerably more.

Access. The court stops being tied to physical distance. For someone living hundreds of kilometres away, stuck abroad, or with limited mobility, electronic access is the difference between a real right to defend yourself and a formal one.

Impartiality. Automated assignment, a traceable record of actions, an open register of decisions — these work whether or not any particular person wants them to.

Accountability. With data, the system’s performance can be assessed objectively. Without it, every assessment comes down to trust.

None of this follows automatically from installing software. It follows when the system genuinely works, rests on a legal basis, is properly supported, and is built so that it can be checked. That is what the work was aimed at.