Danish IT awards favours IT in court

Posted: June 01, 2010 by Daniel Vámosi Martinussen

At the recent annual award ceremony for the foremost IT initiatives the industry favoured IT within the legislative body amongst others.

Why would you want to drive prosecuted all the way from prison to court merely to conduct a few minutes short conversation? That was the question asked by the Danish court system and now they have come up with the answer themselves.

The Courts of Denmark initiated a test programme to survey experiences with videoconference between prosecuted in prison and judges in the courtroom. The test programme was restricted to the southern part of Jutland but would quickly reveal obvious advantages:

"Previously it would require two policemen to spend the majority of a working day to escort a person from prison in Haderslev to court in Esbjerg (In Southern Jutland) for a deadline extension. Now it takes a few minutes with a videoconference" says Director of Programme, Simon Gjedde, the Danish Courts.

The advantages of saved transport and working hours convinced the jury consisting of the IT-Business, Danish IT and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to elect the Courts of Denmark's videoconference initiative as the winner of the green it award.

Since the Danish Minister of Science, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, recently presented the program with the award the Danish Courts is already looking to expand the pilot project to a national system. The bill will land around DKK 150 million to equip 140 courtrooms and 51 police stations and prisons but the savable amounts are equally vast.

Source: Version2