Civil justice is modernized: video and audio allowed in civil trials
As ItaliaOggi reports, Italian justice is modernizing: Video and audio legitimately enter as evidentiary elements in civil trials. In the new technical specifications for civil and criminal electronic trials there are also files such as mp4 and mp3 among the electronic documents that the parties can attach to the documents, thus opening the trial to multimedia: the draft of the provision of the Ministry of Justice , edited of the department for the digital transition of via Arenula, will remain in public consultation for a few more days before coming into force.
This change had already been announced in July by Undersecretary Andrea Ostellari, speaking at question time in the Senate Justice Committee : in his response to the question, the Government representative was confident that the problem would be resolved "by 2023". The maximum size of the electronic envelope increases to 60 megabytes, however this limit remains low and therefore the videos will have to be broken up, a situation which risks making the inclusion of video evidence complicated.
What formats are allowed?
The novelty lies in article 15, first paragraph, points c) and d), of the DGSIA provision, the general directorate for the automated information systems of Justice: among the formats admitted as attached files there are videos belonging to the mpeg2 and mpeg4 families , namely mp4, m4v, mov, mpg, mpeg and avi. And as far as audio is concerned, in addition to mp3, the raw, wav, aiff and aif extensions are authorized. The attachments are always signed with a digital signature or qualified electronic signature in the cases provided for by law, to certify their truthfulness and origin, and in the case of compression, the signature must be subsequent to this procedure.
Videos consistent with new commercial practices
So far, however, the technical specifications of the electronic civil trial have allowed only files with the extension "pdf, odf, rtf, txt, jpg, gif, tiff and xml" to be filed as attachments, therefore no format that would allow the direct production of audio and video . At the moment , article 196 quater disp. att. Cpc , introduced by legislative decree n. 149 of 10/10/2022 , according to which "the judge may order the filing of paper copies of individual deeds and documents for specific reasons". In short, it was the reserve clause introduced by the Cartabia reform that allowed the deposit "through the burning of the audio file on CD or DVD support and its material deposit in the registry". Now the modification of the technical specifications also overcomes the conflict of jurisprudence that has arisen on the need or otherwise of the judge's authorization to deposit "the analogue support capable of preserving the integrity of the document". The change is necessary as the conclusion of contracts through recording the consent of the counterparties is now increasingly widespread which, at this point, can be directly attached to civil cases, for a better decision by the judge.
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The article Civil justice is modernized: video and audio allowed in civil trials comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-giustizia-civile-si-modernizza-ammessi-video-e-audio-nel-processo-civile/ on Wed, 10 Jan 2024 10:50:40 +0000.