China’s smart courts apply new technologies such as blockchain or Artificial Intelligence (AI) to decide legal cases.
Blockchain technology is achieving more spaces in daily life and also in important fields such as legal cases. The official news agency Xinhua revealed that more than 3.1 million Chinese litigation activities, from March to October, were settled through blockchain.
These are called “courts of the future” since citizens can communicate with non-human, virtual, AI-powered judges through multiple screens. This is useful when human judges cannot be present physically in the curt but they could be present thanks to blockchain.
Another interesting aspect of the operation of this current system is that citizens also can receive court decisions by text or through major messaging services. This is an example of the versatility and the capability that blockchain technology has to execute different activities.
“In the current use of AI as an assistant to make rulings, efficiency is prioritized over accuracy. A human judge is ultimately responsible for the fair ruling (…) But we are heading toward a future when we can see an AI judge sitting at the podium”, Zhang Wen, President of the Beijing Internet Court said last April.
The legal profession in China takes advantage of new technologies such as machine learning, online communication tools, and, of course, blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.
A Year Full of Blockchain Developments
During 2019, China has solved an increasing number of contentious cases using blockchain technology. This means more than one million citizens and approximately 73,200 lawyers had signed up for a smart court request.
After establishing the “world-first” smart Internet court in the eastern city of Hangzhou in 2017, China launched similar operations in other cities of that Asian country like Guangzhou and, of course, Beijing. Today, these procedures are practiced regularly in more than 12 regions at the provincial level.
Besides, the Supreme Court of China announced that smart courts would use blockchain to analyze the collected evidence and store it with precise timestamps. The positive aspect is that the tamper-proof platform guarantees the authenticity of the data collected and stored for legal cases.
Zhang added that blockchain technology is being leveraged to prioritize efficiency over accuracy.
But although blockchain technology and Artificial Intelligence would facilitate all legal proceedings, the final decision would be taken by a human judge.
For these reasons, crypto users, who know about blockchain, consider that the day is not far away when technology will replace a practicing judge on the podium.
During September 2018, the Supreme Court declared that “Internet courts shall recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties collected and stored these data via blockchain with digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform, and can prove the authenticity of such technology used”.
The majority of the crypto users think that China would continue to make grow Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in legal cases so blockchain is being more than a platform to store only digital payments.
By María Rodríguez
