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Conference on legal information in electronic environment
14 April 2011 the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library held the first theoretical and practical conference “Electronic legislation: access to normative legal information in electronic environment” organized in joint effort with the Federal Protective Service of Russia. Information partners of the event were “Garant” company and “Codex” consortium.
The conference was attended by about 300 participants from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Leningrad region, as well as from nine regions of Russia. Foreign experts were represented by those from the Republic of Belarus and Germany.
The participants of the conference were greeted by the chairman of the Federation Council of Russian Federal Assembly S. M. Mironov and Assistant to the President - Head of Legal Department of the Russian Federation President L. I. Brycheva. The conference was opened by Director General of the Presidential Library, A. P. Vershinin.
Presentations were made by representatives of governments, academic institutions, heads of companies - developers of reference legal systems.
The plenary session was broadcasted on the Presidential Library portal. It was virtually attended via video conference by participants from Krasnoyarsk, Arkhangelsk, Kamensk-Uralsk.
The session was presided by V. B. Naumov, the head of Russian practice on intellectual property, information technology and telecommunications, a partner at law firm “Salans”. The report on current status and prospects of development of legal information in electronic environment was presented by the Head of Department of legal informatization support of the service of special communication and information of the Federal Protective Service of Russia A. S. Budakov. I. L. Bachilo (Institute of state and law under the Russian Academy of Sciences) reported on public libraries as law information centers.
Great interest was the report of the Vice President of Information Legal Consortium "Code" I. I. Mironova, covering the problems of access to official texts of legal documents. There was a lively discussion on the issues of reliability and completeness of the legal information in an electronic environment, the degree of responsibility of persons providing free access to legal documents containing errors. Participants discussed the question of raising the legal culture of the population, informing citizens about the existence of official databases of legal information in an electronic environment. Among the speakers also were N. V. Tkachenko (production management of the company "Garant-Service-University”), E.G. Avakian (management office of the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation).
As a part of the conference there were two thematic workshops: Workshop 1. "Current organizational and legal issues of access to legal information in an electronic environment", Workshop 2. Improvement of technologies for creating, processing, retrieval and access to electronic legal information” and post-graduates seminar.
In the first workshop were presented 16 reports by federal agencies of informatization and legal information, research institutions, information and referral systems, universities and libraries. The workshop was chaired by D. A. Saveliev (Presidential Library). Practical experience of legal informatization in the Leningrad region was highlighted in the reports of V. E. Kovalchuk (Office of Special Communications and Information FSO of Russia in the Northwest Federal District) and S. Yu. Demochko, adviser of the governor of Leningrad region. Theoretical aspects of the organization of handling the legal information in an electronic environment were raised in the reports by M. A. Vus (St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation under the Russian Academy of Sciences) and A. V. Morozov (Russian Legal Academy of the Russian Federation Ministry of Justice). Workshop participants highlighted the report of S. G. Mikhailenko (National Center of Legal Information of the Republic of Belarus) on the experience of providing electronic legal information in Belarus.
The second workshop included 19 reports made by representatives of federal authorities, scientific institutions, CEOs of developers of reference legal systems, legal centers, libraries. The meeting was chaired by P. G. Tereschenko (Presidential Library). Lengthy discussion revolved around the report of N. Yu. Blagoveshensky (Scientific center of legal information under the Justice Ministry of Russia). Also, interest was aroused by reports of the representatives of the National Center of Legal Information of the Republic of Belarus, the Russian National Library, the Volgograd regional scientific library named after M. Gorky, and the Academy of the Prosecutor’s General Office of the Russian Federation. Practical advices and experience of using the technologies for creating, processing, search, e-legal information contained in submissions by developers from FSO of Russia, Pravo.ru, Center of Legal Information of the Russian Interior Ministry, "Code" and "Guarant" systems, SRI "Voshod", “AS” company, "ELAR” corporation and ABBYY Russia. Special look at the problems and shortcomings of the existing resource of legal systems was outlined in a speech by M. L. Pozdnyakov (Institute of Law Enforcement under the European University of St. Petersburg).
Post-graduates seminar was chaired by E. D. Zhabko (Presidential Library). Young scholars have discussed the problem of representation of legal documents in an electronic environment, and providing access to them.
As a result of the conference it is planned to prepare a compendium of scientific of papers both in print and electronic forms. It is assumed that the electronic version of the compendium will be posted on the portal of the Presidential Library for free access.
Conference participants unanimously expressed their desire to continue the discussion of problems of access to legal information in an electronic environment in subsequent conferences.