Computer aided anonymization and redaction of judicial documents

Abstract

Public access to case law is a required prerequisite for the legal certainty and the rule of law. Nevertheless, according to the law, only authorized persons can access judgments in their non-anonymized and unredacted form. This paper proposes a computer aided method for anonymization and redaction of judgments, with an aim to improve efficiency of overall process. The anonymization and redaction procedure is based on the access control mechanism for XML documents. AKOMA NTOSO is chosen as an XML format in order to facilitate integration with other (legal) information systems, but the proposed method can be easily adapted to different document types and different XML formats. The method is verified by a prototype implementation which is validated by employees in a court of law.