SAFLII

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SAFLII

Challenges to Building a Legal Information
Network in Africa
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Fast Update

• Over 6500 judgments and tribunal decisions
• Law Reform Commission papers
• Working on publishing in the immediate future
• ZASCA judgments 1978 1998
• Uganda Legislation
• Zimbabwe
• Zambia
• Lesotho
• ZASCA judgments to inception at 1910

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Background and Operational Environment

• SAFLII Operational Environment
• General state of ICT in Southern and East Africa
• Automation in courts
• ICT literacy
• Information literacy
• Lack of standardization in the preparation of
  legal material
• Legal information market dominated by commercial
  publishers or a complete void
• General lack of availability of free to use
  secondary legal materials

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• Angola 1.3
• Botswana 3.2
• Lesotho 1.8
• Kenya 3.1
• Madagascar 0.5
• Malawi 0.5
• Mauritius 14.1
• Mozambique 0.7
• Namibia 3.7
• Seychelles 23.8
• South Africa 10.4
• Swaziland 3.1
• Tanzania 0.9
• Uganda 1.8
• Zambia 2.1
• Zimbabwe 8.2
• The Good News?

www.saflii.org
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Background and Operational Environment

• Legal system Roman-Dutch Law, English Common
  Law and Civil Law
• English, French and Portuguese
• and the phones wont always work

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Challenges

• Organizational issues
• Content issues
• Technical issues

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Organizational issues

• Southern African Judges Commission
• 2003 Zanzibar Conference to promote the
  exchange of case-law between the courts in the
  region and abroad.
• Building Partnerships with local resources
• Kenya Law Reporting Council (www.kenyalaw.org)
• Zimbabwe Legal Resources Foundation
• ZamLII
• Namibia Courts websites
• Uganda Law Reporting Council

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Organizational issues

• Flexibility
• - Adjust the information system to meet user and
  stakeholders needs
• Building and including local resources
• Competence
• Legal competence
• Technical competence
• Competence in legal information management
• Training intern program

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Formation of Country Resource Centers

• Members or Supporters of FALA
• Standards Adoption
• Technical Infrastructure
• Human Resources
• Financial Resources

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Building a network of legal information
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Regional Models

• Models
• Model 1 Federated search and URI catalogue
• Model 2 Technical and human resources
• Model 3 Technical and financial resources
• Model 4 Technical, human and financial resources
• SAFLII
• Consulting and support
• Research and development
• Open standards development and management
• Local content

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Content Challenges

• Building the collections
• Currency of the databases
• Comprehensiveness
• Demand for some advanced features
• Provision of legislation databases
• Collaboration with open content providers of
  secondary materials
• Issues
• Standards
• Promotion of basic legal information standards to
  enhance accessibility of the collection
• Policy
• Privacy and data protection
• Intellectual Property

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Technical Issues

• RD
• Workflow tools for authors
• Solutions for editors
• Advanced features for users
• Federated search
• Thesauri
• Networking requires open standards
• AKOMANTOSO http//www.akomantoso.org/
• Architecture for Knowledge-Oriented Management of
  African Normative Texts using Open Standards and
  Ontologies
• Open document format
• Catalogue of URIs
• Open source software

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Catalogue of URIs

• Referenceable concepts FRBR model
• WORK the abstract concept of the legal resource
  (e.g., act 3 of 2005)
• EXPRESSION any version of the WORK (whose
  content is specified and different from others
  for any reason language, versions, etc.)
• MANIFESTATION any electronic or physical format
  of the EXPRESSION word, xml, Tiff, pdf, etc.
• ITEM physical copy of any manifestation in the
  form of a file stored somewhere in some computer
  on the Internet or offline.

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• true accessibility

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International Workshop - Legislative Drafting in
Africa

• Invites African Parliaments to contribute to the
  elaboration of legislative drafting guidelines
  for Africa to promote better legislation and
  foster the harmonisation of legislation at
  continental level, which is a strategic objective
  of the Pan African Parliament.
• Abuja Declaration, March 2007
• Delegations from the Pan African Parliament and
  the Parliaments of Angola, Cameroon, Gambia,
  Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger,
  Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania,
  Togo, Uganda, Zimbabwe. Officials from the SADC
  Parliamentary Forum, the European Parliament, the
  UK Parliament, the United States National
  Conference of State Legislatures, and
  representatives of the United Nations and of
  African and European universities also attended
  the Conference.
• 10-11 December 2007
• Hatfield Campus
• University of Pretoria
• South Africa

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Thank you