Court staff training vital

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By CHARLES MOI
CHIEF Justice Sir Salamo Injia says the judiciary has put in a lot of effort to train its staff to manage the new enterprise based database system.
Speaking on day two of the Pacific Judicial Conference in Port Moresby yesterday, Sir Salamo said the data base was introduced to support the new case management system which improved the performance of the courts.
“What is critical to this new data base among other critical things is the involvement of our court staff,” he said.
“Over the last three to four years we have gone through a lot of training and they (court staff) have come out very well. They are the ones who put in data daily.”
“If they (court staff) do not put in the right information onto the data base everything else will go wrong.”
“They are instructed to enter the data within 24 hours of the activity that comes to their knowledge. If a case is filed today, in any of the two courts within 24 hours the case will appear on the data base. The same applies to recording of court proceedings and to the input of court orders.”
“I appreciate the staff who put in the long hours to put in the data. Of course there is money involved (but) money itself is not going to work. We really need to put in the right people behind the computer to produce this type of data.”
“The data base has been built (and) modified to the judiciary’s requirements. It is important for the judiciary particularly the judges to specify the kind of data we would want. I know that if we are not careful we could be getting a system in place (or) a data base in place that we could not work with.”
Sir Salamo said the thing that was lacking in the data base was that there was no video recording of court proceedings.
“I have made a deliberate decision not to record court proceedings in Papua New Guinea,” he said.
Sir Salamo commended the information technology adviser to the National Judiciary Staff and Services (NJSS) Koichi Nakagawa for assisting the judiciary to set up the new data base.
Nakawaga joined JICA senior volunteer as IT development engineer and was dispatched to the IT division of NJSS in 2012.