Tracking Courts.ie

Courts.ie is a pretty difficult website to navigate. As government-type websites go, it probably has more information than you might expect. There is lots of room for improvement though. Apparently, in line with guidance from the Data Protection Commissioner, Courts.ie blocks Google from indexing its website. This relates to the so-called “right to be forgotten”.

However, access to information rights are not limited to access to government documents via FOI or AIE, they also extend to courts documents. In Ireland the system is positively Victorian.

A quick examination of the Courts Robots.txt file tells us how the indexing works. Robots.txt is the file that tells search engines what they can and can’t index. Here’s the Courts one:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /legaldiary.nsf/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /judgments.nsf/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /LegalDiary.NSF/

Which basically tells Google to feck off from the legal diary and judgments. The text that appears in these pages won’t appear on Google search results. This makes tracking Courts.ie all the more difficult, but also all the more essential, particularly for journalists.

For example:

Screen Shot 2013-10-22 at 20.47.45

These cases, filed on October 21, apparently involving IBRC (formerly Anglo Irish Bank) board members Alan Dukes and Mike Aynsley vs Independent News & Media, look to be of some news interest.

Tracking court filings is one of the basics of journalism, it’s a shame the Courts website doesn’t make it easier.

Supreme Court grants expedited listing in NAMA case

In another turn of events relevant to Aarhus Convention and access to information nerds, today Chief Justice Susan Denham granted an expedited listing for NAMA vs Office of the Commissioner for Environmental Information (OCEI).

The AIE request in the matter was sent by me in early 2010, and 44 months later the issue at hand – whether NAMA is a public authority for the purposes of the Regulations – is still not answered. We argued that such a delay was at odds with the Aarhus Convention’s requirement for a timely judicial process. For its part, counsel for NAMA Brian Murray SC made similar arguments, saying that NAMA had a significant interest in the case and the timeliness of the process was at issue. NAMA applied for an expedited listing – in a slight change of tack from previous hearings. In a submission made in the Supreme Court case earlier this year, we put it to the court that NAMA had in fact frustrated the process by taking a narrow view of the initial request (as the High Court had determined) and had acted in bad faith.

Chief Justice Denham said that the case would be heard in this term (before Christmas) if a date became available, but failing that it would be early in the new term – most likely January or February of 2014. Increasingly the Aarhus Convention is being noted in Irish court cases, and we emphasised in our submission that the Aarhus Convention was essentially being breached due to the delays in this case.

This is the submission we handed to the Chief Justice this morning outlining arguments in relation to delays relevant to Aarhus cases.



Is this IBRC's Statement of Affairs?

This comes from an anonymous Twitter account – @QuinnAnglo – so all the usual provisos apply.

The tweeter in question claims this document to be the Statement of Affairs of IBRC before the liquidation of the company in February 2013. It includes a list of creditors (though not depositors – as Noonan intervened on that one).

The Statement of Affairs was handed over to the Department of Finance recently and took some 8 months to produce. Some hedge funds are investigating if the bank’s insolvency was contrived and are considering taking legal action.

The account has been mentioning it to various journalists on Twitter:

The list of creditors is hard to read but contains some interesting names.

Of course that’s on the basis that the document is real. I asked the anonymous Twitter account if the document is real and got this reply:

Here is the document: