TCI Chief Justice exposes how Tech Upgrades enhancing Accessibility to Justice System 

Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer 

#TurksandCaicos, January 18, 2024 – Significant technological advancements are in the works for the Turks and Caicos Judiciary in the 2024 Legal Year according to Mabel Agyemang, Chief Justice.

Already, both the Magistrate Courts and Supreme Courts in Providenciales and Grand Turk have been provided with kiosks, says the Chief Justice. The kiosks which are manned by trained personnel, allow self-represented individuals to file claims.

Her Ladyship, Agyemang provided the updates during the Legal Year Opening Ceremony on January 4.

“We have also commenced the expansion of access to North Caicos, and Middle Caicos where we are establishing kiosks at the District Commissioner’s Offices. We are working with the Police to expand the service to South Caicos,” the CJ revealed.

It comes as the Judiciary also utilizes the e-Curia system to go fully digital. The Supreme Court has already gone paperless and the Court of Appeal will soon stop accepting paper filings as well.

“As part of this initiative, we have commenced the process of expanding this service to the Magistrate’s Courts by migrating its Court Registry onto the e-Curia system,” Agyemang added.

As for the digitization of older records, scanning for records from 2017 to 2023 has been completed at the Supreme Court level.

Additionally, TCILII, the portal via which residents can access rulings, was updated with a more user-friendly search engine.

TCILII is proving useful as there were 4,700 visits to the site by 1,837 users; 1,739 of which were new users from areas including Paris, London, the Caribbean Region (Kingston, Port of Spain, and Nassau), New York, Washington, Des Moines, Atlanta, Georgetown, San Antonio, and Miami; Canada (Toronto) and Asia (Lahore and Mumbai) were also named by the chief justice.

In terms of training, The entire legal fraternity, private and public, as well as the police took part in training sessions offered by the Judicial Education Institute (JEI), on topics ranging from vulnerable witnesses to cryptocurrency.

Finally, the current caseload, the judiciary carried over 101 pending criminal cases from 2022. In 2023, there were 54 new cases filed. Altogether 87 criminal cases were disposed of leaving 182 active.

In terms of civil litigation, 82 civil cases were carried over from 2022.

Last year,  176 civil cases were filed, of this number, 136 cases were disposed of. A total of 20 family cases were carried over from 2022 and 49 new cases were filed in 2023; 25 cases were

disposed of.

The Court of Appeal got through all of its 27 cases