The International Online Arbitration Court:
Juridical questions
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The states and procedural sequences of the International Online Arbitration Court were successfully specified. It is now of interest to comment on the juridical problem constellations encountered while working on this ambitious project. All procedural steps and states of an ordinary court were translated to a web-based reference court system, online mediation of conflicts were included; this strategy proved sometimes rather
involved.
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The final system is intended to operate substantially in an automated fashion. Now from a juridical point of view it was not just a problem of mapping and guaranteeing law-compliant procedural sequences when specifying the International Online Arbitration Court. The online court system is expected to work with a small work force; hence 'safety precautions' had to be arranged such that human errors could be avoided and essentials like the impartiality of arbiters, the fair and equal treatment of the parties as well as sufficient hearing could be warranted and supervised. As an example the system will automatically observe if each submission to the Online Arbitration Court has been communicated to the other participants while adhering to all reasonable confidentiality rules. Or the system is seriously concerned that equal chances w.r.t hearing rights are preserved for claimant and defendant. If both parties have received specific timetables within which to respond (e.g. to a witness) then the system will allow
only identical time spans. The arbiter could try to ignore such procedural principles, which amount to the constitutional commandment of guaranteed hearing rights (see Art. 103 Abs. 1 GG), or in case the claimant is entitled to longer time period than the defendant; the system will not allow , however, such
differences.
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A further, not the last important juridical theme complex centers around the question which form requirements electronic documents submitted to an Online Arbitration Court must obey. For ordinary courts the prevailing regulation (§ 130 a ZPO) requires qualified signatures (§ 2 Ziff. 3 SigG); is analogously required that all preparatory arbitrational submissions have qualified signatures as is required for an electronic arbitration agreement with consumer participation (§ 1031 Abs. 5 S. 2 ZPO)?
It had e.g. to be clarified from a data protection rights point of view if an Online Arbitration Court corresponds to a telephone service - with all the consequences w.r.t. identifying the pertinent data protection
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This is a little insight into the complexity of the juridical questions appearing during Online Arbitration Court operations. An in depth report is planned in future
papers.
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