The Bar Association of Belgrade is seeking amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code and the Law on Civil Procedure to allow for the obligatory recording of all trials in Serbia.
“We will submit an initiative to the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Serbia to record all trials in Serbia. By introducing a special technology that allows a 95 percent true-time tone to be converted into a transcript, the duration of court proceedings will be drastically shortened and the efficiency of the judiciary improved, “the Bar Association of Belgrade said today.
“In courtrooms in Serbia, the biggest problem is keeping records. The court dictates the record by persuading the testimony and entering only the content it considers relevant. When reviewing the evidence, important details are lost, so much time is lost in the discussion about whether the witness said something or not. If this debate fails, the trials would be faster. The solution to this problem is to record a trial that would reduce the number of hours of courtroom use per case and improve the efficiency of the judiciary in a way that would not question the fairness of the proceedings, “said Yugoslavia Tintor, president of the Belgrade Bar Association.
He adds that tone recording of the trial is based on state-of-the-art technology – a program that is installed on the computer and using neural networks – artificial intelligence converts the voice into text by recognizing and printing meaningful sentences. This program, which has been developed for 15 years, is specially developed for the Serbo-speaking field. It consists of a million words, phrases, expressions and sentences from court practice.
Everything that, for example, the judge of the dictatorship is written in real time, in a Cyrillic script, in the manner in which the user spoke. Since it has various options, in addition to audio, it allows converting and video to text.
“The mandatory recording of the trial would establish a court order, provide elementary jurisdiction in the conduct of the parties and the court, and allow for the sanctioning of any abuse of procedural rights. It is known that parties in the court proceedings in many ways obstruct its course. Tone recording of the trial would contribute to the ordering of the proceedings, as both the parties and the court would refrain from excessive proceedings if they knew that the whole trial had been recorded tonally, “says Tintor.
This software is currently experimentally used in several courts in Serbia, with the permission of the Ministry of Justice, and a large number of prosecutors are interested in it. Tone recording of the trial has already been introduced into countries in the region. It was introduced in Croatia three months ago.