Case Matrix developers honored with the Dieter Meurer Förderpreis
The offences which the International Criminal Court in The Hague has to prosecute are as terrible as they are complicated from the perspective of lawyers. A multitude of legal requirements and their relation to the constituent facts of the respective crime have to be considered. To improve quality and transparency for all participants in such legal proceedings, a computer-based evidence management tool – the Case Matrix – has been developed at the Institute for law and informatics at Saarland University pursuant to direction from the International Criminal Court. With the aid of the Case Matrix the presence of all legal elements of crimes can be verified: the means of proof (films, pictures, sound recordings or protocols) are organized in a multimedia database which relates them clearly to the respective constituent fact to be proven. So even complicated cases with several suspects and large amounts of evidence become better organized and more transparent for all participants, and gaps in the chains of proof are self-evident.
With more than 7,000 pages of commentary integrated into the Case Matrix, the legal requirements of the international crimes and forms of participation in such crimes – as well as the corresponding types of proof – are immediately and comprehensively available, including relevant precedents. Another decisive advantage compared to flipcharts and large-scale printouts is the consistent platform for all participants with a homogenous dataset. The individual investigators and lawyers enter information into the system in accordance with their area of responsibility. In so doing, a consolidated dataset is created that makes the current state of proceeding clearly comprehensible and facilitates an overview even in the most complicated cases.
A library of thousands of the most important documents in international criminal law is available to the Case Matrix user as a legal information service. This includes national decisions and decisions from international criminal jurisdictions like the ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals.
The Case Matrix has been translated into French, Indonesian and Khmer, and Arabic, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Spanish versions are under preparation.
For the development of the Case Matrix Morten Bergsmo from the PRIO research institute in Oslo and Ralph Hecksteden from the Institute of Law and Informatics at the University of Saarland are honored with the Dieter Meurer Förderpreis in 2008. This research award has been endowed by the company juris GmbH and the association EDV-Gerichtstag e.V. in memory of Professor Dieter Meurer who passed away in 2000. Dieter Meurer was one of the pioneers of law and informatics in Germany. His main field of research was possible practical applications of information technology in law. The Dieter Meurer Förderpreis is therefore accorded to projects with a high degree of practical relevance.