ECM Briefs

With our LiveLinkUp Europe customer events this week, we’re releasing an interesting podcast featuring John Hunter, Head of IT Division for the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), who discusses how the organization’s Web-based knowledge management system is helping ECHR keep pace with a staggering volume of applications.

ECHR deals with allegations of human rights violations against the Council of Europe’s forty-seven member states. It is legally obligated to publish its judgments and make information concerning its activities available to the public. Making human rights violations public is an important part of the Court’s work because the deterrent effects of the publicity helps to promote more effective human rights protection at a national level.

Faced with a massive increase in the volume of applications (500 percent over seven years) and a limited budget, the Court’s primary objective was to speed up the processing of cases and optimize the human resources available to it by introducing more efficient, labor-saving procedures.

The ECHR has been implementing an integrated document and knowledge management system from Open Text for a decade now and it has become an indispensable tool for the accomplishment of the Court’s mission. The IT system not only streamlines the business processes of the Court to enable it to deal with the ever increasing number of applications, it also provides a public service via its Internet sites to citizens across Europe and indeed the world. Since its roll-out, the system has acquired an international reputation as ground-breaking technology and best practice in the relevant domain.

You can also read more about ECHR in a recently published success story and in an interview we posted with John early last year.