Remote hearings - practice and learning from Australia and New Zealand: research findings

Introduction

In order to keep the rule of law during the COVID-19 emergency, court systems across the world adapted to introduce or escalate the amount of business they conducted remotely. This included digital filing of paper work and the use of communication technology to conduct court hearings remotely.

This is the first in a series of papers that were rapidly produced to deliver emerging evidence on remote hearings, their positives and negatives, and any lessons we could usefully transfer to the Scottish context. The evidence was emerging and could be sketchy, and as such these papers were not designed to be comprehensive or rigorous. Rather, they were designed to deliver any emerging intelligence that we found that may have been of use for those developing policy and practice around remote hearings.

This is a rapid review of evidence and intelligence from New Zealand and Australia on the use of remote hearings.