About

Well-functioning of the judicial system has an important impact on the quality of public life and of democracy. A well-functioning and trustwothy judiciary is a necessary pre-condition for a good business environment as well as civic life. Slovaks are not satisfied with the current state of judiciary. According to the Eurobarometer from 2018, less than 30% of Slovak general public perceive courts as independent.

During the last few years we have been able to find more information about courts and judges, but restrictions of access to other information related to their activity still exist.

Simultaneously, discussions about the functioning and the quality of judiciary suffer from two major shortcomings. Firstly, they are often over-generalizing (“judges are corrupt”) without any clear reference to those responsible or without any identification of problems. Secondly, majority of discussions are held only among unnecessarily restricted group of legal professionals. Open Courts aim to contribute to the improvement of the discussion about Slovak judiciary in three ways:

  1. improvement of accessibility of information about activities and performance of judges and courts,
  2. the data are interconnected and allow for comparisons,
  3. doing so on the level of particular judges and courts.

Authors of the project are Samuel Molnár and Pavol Zbell (former members of research group PeWe at Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies of Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava) and Transparency International Slovakia.

Project Open Courts was created thanks to the support of Secretariat of Transparency International in Berlin and the project Reštart Slovensko organized by Centre for Philantropy. Portal updates were funded by Fund for transparent Slovakia in Pontis foundation.

For the hosting of the project we are grateful to Websupport.sk.

For help and useful comments we are also very thankful to Pavel Nechala, Katarína Batková, Chris Worman, Milena Marin and others.

Further information about the project can be found in the FAQ section.