(5 October 2008)
The Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD) has announced the completion of a major portion of its ambitious project of electronic archiving of cases. The accomplishment involved archiving 32,300,000 judicial documents pertaining to over 669,000 cases in Abu Dhabi, Western Region and Al Ain. The move is part of the Department’s efforts to accelerate its momentum towards e-government systems that will bring benefits to employees, customers, lawyers, experts and other stakeholders. The project has started in September 2007. Rashed Saqer Al Dhaheri, Director of IT department, Abu Dhabi Judicial Department said: "The Archiving project at Abu Dhabi Judicial Department involved creating a robust and standardized system for archiving all the judicial documents electronically and ensures confidentiality and security. It is designed to save time and efforts involving managing functions of searching, retrieving and categorizing information.” The daily average began at 100,000 documents and the team in charge of the archiving process managed to increase it to 150,000 per day. The IT department at the ADJD implemented the project in phases. The first phase covered Abu Dhabi City and Western Region where all paper archives were migrated to electronic systems, involving First Instance, Appeals and Cassation Courts as well as prosecution cases. The work included scanning and categorization to ease up the retrieval process and display it to authorized users. The second phase covered Al Ain where all the above mentioned cases were archived. Al Dhaheri said: "The department accords top priority to enhancing the judicial operations to meet international best practices through the deployment of latest information technologies. “Abu Dhabi Judicial Department plans will soon start the job of archiving The Notary Public documents, authentications, marriage documents and human resources files." Al Dhaheri added.