Vaganyan G.A., Advisor of the Constitutional Court of Republic Armenia, Doctor of economic sciences, Candidate of technical sciences, Professor, official representative of the Venice Commission of Council of Europe

           Modern tendencies of democratization, of development of general human values are characterized by increasing quality of management of legal development, creation of international precedent constitutional law, formation of state constitutional control. The aspiration to adopt the European constitution predetermines new tasks of informatization of law making and law realizing (law enforcement) activity. Industry of co-ordination by the European community of the process of increasing of efficiency of the law and its application in the new conditions becomes the most important goal of e-democratization.

           European models and standards require creation of adequate instrument and acting strategy of designing of the uniform legal information space that will allow many countries not to abreast of pace of development. Standardization in the field of legal technology is the most important decision, which guarantees the high quality not only of law making, but also constitutional justice and constitutional control. It will enable greatly to reduce the price of management of democratization of states, to assist the European wide monitoring for judicial activities. Introduction of standardizations of legal technologies will give the appreciable advantages, both for producer (courts), and for consumer (the society, citizens).

           Information and cognitive legal information technologies (IT) are the major engineering block of the whole building named "Electronic democracy". The main driving power of advancement towards e-democracy is the aspiration to make democracy, government, legislative bodies, constitutional courts and political processes more open for the society and hereunder to give each of them chances and possibilities of active participation in state control, in establishment of justice. If this or that institution does not give information concerning its activities it is difficult to expect from the society, citizens openness, activity and great amount of applications to this institution, in one word, to the dialogue between citizens and the power, state bodies. In modern conditions social relations, social capital more and more depend on capital of legal relations. Legal relations, in turn, depend on efficiency of using of legal IT.

           So the best way to guarantee on-line involvement of the citizens in processes of making decisions is to introduce dialogue instruments in official democratic processes and thereby to provide systematic and full access to legal, legal public information, especially about constitutional rights of the citizens. Information besides theoretical value has high practical value since it is the base component of e-democracy.

           "E-democracy" is defined as public use of Internet-technologies to give information, to provide communication. As a whole the analysis of constitutional information space shows that practically in the total problem of electronic democracy there are involved four following categories of the problems: on-line (dialogue) information and problem of the notional device, uniform and available for specialists and citizens, facilities of the electronic constitutional court, on-line participation of citizens and problems of infrastructure. The generalized description of each category of these problems is given below.

           Till present there exist in practice no uniform united approach to such key legal notions as "criteria", "principles", "conditions", "preconditions ", "facilities", "possibilities", "restriction of human rights". Without standardization of the notional device and unification of decisions of the constitutional courts it is impossible to install active operative on-line dialogue not only between the constitutional courts but also between national courts and national institutes of justice, between citizens and the government, as well as between courts of genera jurisdiction.

           Facilities of the electronic constitutional court (CC). This category of problems covers use of Internet, e-mail and other instruments for granting services with greater efficiency, velocity, with perfected access and higher quality. The example of on-line access to the decisions is shown by the Constitutional Court of Armenia, where the sides, participating in judicial cases, have the possibility of free dialogue access to decisions on similar or close events. Information on web-site http://www.concourt.am (acts since 1997) is submitted in three languages: Armenian, Russian and English and displays the structure of the court and the sphere of its activity. On the first page it is possible to see the whole menu of access to the main sections of the site: "About the Constitutional Court", "The Constitution of Republic Armenia", Law of Republic Armenia "About the Constitutional Court", "Regulations of the CC", "Staff", "Decisions", "Schedule of judicial sessions", "Library", "International relations", "Annual reports", as well as projects, created and realized in the Constitutional Court of Republic Armenia (ris.1).

           Picture1. Page of the site the Constitutional Court of Republic Armenia

           Such structure enables the citizens first to get acquainted with the legal base of activities of the court, its functions and results to activity, then to get acquainted with the personnel and members of the court, as well as to communicate with them on e-mail. For each member of the court there are brought their biographic data and e-mail address. Hereinafter follow the decisions of the court, divided into groups on years from 1996 till 2008. There are presented full-texts of all decisions (in total 741 on 25.03.08) in the Armenian language and the most significant are presented in the Russian and English languages.

           For the period of activity of the Constitutional Court of Republic Armenia, there have been published a number of books, monographs, scientific journals, articles, bulletins of Conferences of bodies of the constitutional control of the countries of the young democracy "Constitutional justice", collections of the International Almanac "The Constitutional justice in the new millennium" and others. Section "Electronic library" gives information about activity of the court outside of direct duties, and is the virtual scholastic book for scientists, students, lawyers and judges, common citizens in the field of law, constitutional control. Besides, the CC disposes the great electronic library on compact disks. Since 1996 the court has organized different conferences: annual international Erevan seminars, which have already become traditional, international seminars Unidem and others. The materials of these activities are presented in section "Conferences". All interested persons can not only read the reports, but can also copy them.

           In the transitional society, in our opinion, the constitutional courts as the phenomena of the new epoch should become the centre of the new legal thinking, formation of new mentality, and first of all of the youth. The Constitutional Court of Armenia has undertaken the task through the public organization - Centre of the Constitutional Law to realize training and organizing of republican Olympiads for the youth. The Olympiads serve the demonstrative example and practical instrument for the youth on use of new information, web-technologies. The students of schools and high school from different regions and the city of Armenia, connected to network Internet, call at on websites olympiads, get acquainted with educational resources, rules and conditions of organization of olympiads, copy virtual laws, test questions and, having answered them, become the participants of the olympiads, send their answers on e-mail. As a result the greater number of schools and schoolchildren, teachers with greater enthusiasm and activity are involved in participation in olympiads.

           At present the majority of courts give their information through Internet for mass access. Thus, the important condition for full realization of granting of on-line information is strengthening of cooperation between electronic courts and created public-private partnership by joint (separated) use of the uniform information. It gives the grounds for the specialists to confirm that the first tendency in the field of development of the electronic democracy is in strengthening of mutual cooperation and joint use of total for all interacting sides of information.

           In sections of the site of the Constitutional Court of Armenia there are presented the unique information basis "Constitutions of the countries of the world", "International documents on human rights", other legal resources, as well as electronic catalogue of the references to legal facilities of Internet, having great popularity among users of the network, both in the republic, and abroad. The Directory legal resource is the powerful modern instrument for quick search for necessary legal information, familiarization with different international and concretely inherent to the given country experience, with legal tasks and their decisions. The given instrument allows the user during minutes to install and support relations with other legal institutes. Using universal search technologies, only within the framework of the given directory, there are decided many complex tasks of the Constitutional court with the greater efficiency, speed and accuracy. In section of the international relationship of the web-site there are described results of the meetings of the members of the CC of Armenia with the representatives of the constitutional courts of the other countries, the Venice commission, different international organizations on human rights and others.

           The critical factors of success and problems of the infrastructure.

           While the above mentioned problems dealt with use by the citizens of on-line instruments, there still exist serious problems in the field of infrastructures, which is one of the fundamentals of e-democracy. For successful development of instruments of support of the electronic democracy it is necessary to conduct the serious work on reduction of the existing digital stratification in all its displays, on improvement of e-leadership, on development of the technological infrastructure in the countries of the young democracy, on providing of the population with the dialogue access, on option of rational models of granting services on the part of e-courts and the number of the other problems.

           The technologies of processing and analysis of multilingual information resources in decision of legal and educational tasks.

           In the Constitutional Court of Armenia there has been created the unique computer system for the constitutional comparative analysis "Voronum". Its resource base contains 149 constitutions of the different countries of the world, as well as English-Russian-Armenian dictionary main constitutional notions (474 words and expressions), international documents on human rights and English-Russian-Armenian dictionary of the keywords on human rights (179 words and word-combinations). At creation of the given system there has been taken into account that the major number of the users of the legal resource are not specialists in the field of computer technologies. As a result, the system "Voronum" has been enclosed with the subsystem, greatly simplifying functioning(working) of the users: search for document at request in the Russian and English languages, ranking of documents on degree of vicinity to the request, lighting of the discovered phrases and expressions in the document. At present the work is being done on search for documents at request in the Armenian language.

           For simplification of the analysis of the documents, in them there are stood out the words and phrases, on which there has been made the decision on the correspondence of the document to the request. This particularity of the system greatly simplifies the work with the documents found and allows if required, to look through only the necessary fragments of large documents. The advantage of the system is that circumstance that the user being not a professional, jurist there is offered the set of the base keywords. On the screen of the computer there is removed the alphabetic list of the countries of the world, or the map of the world.

           The complex use of Internet basis of the main laws, the basis of the international document on human rights and the basis of local national legislation will allow to create the universal scientific instrument for development and optimization of the uniform European legal information space, to simplify greatly the processes of reforming of local legislation, especially in countries of the young democracy and in the developing countries. The system "Voronum" is the necessary electronic-educational library for students, university educators, registered in the National agency on copyrights on 15.04.1998.

           In spite of broad spreading of Internet in the world, as a whole the degree of its use by the constitutional courts is still insufficient to provide the speed development of the electronic democracy. Not all facilities have gained popularity among the citizens. In this connection we have developed the interactive methodology of measurement and estimation of quality and calling of virtual representation of the constitutional courts and other legal institutes. The designed instrument has allowed conducting the comparative analysis of legal Internet resources of different international organizations, including constitutional courts.

           The notion of quality and calling legal information resource (IR) is rather capacious. It comprises in itself the set of such parameters as timeliness, clarity and accessibility, value, authority, urgency, popularity, informity, validity, information and etc. In our research there have been considered such Internet facilities, as portals, sites and web-pages of bodies of the constitutional justice, constitutional courts, supreme judicial courts, as well as International commissions, institutes, associations, the European Court on human rights, Conference of European constitutional court, legal library of the Congress of the USA and etc. As a whole there have been considered the web-sites of 56 courts, 14 international and European organizations.

           For greater objectivity, convenience and simplicity of the analysis, and proceeding from the principle of sufficiency, in our research there has been used the popular on the rating criteria the international search system GOOGLE (http://www.google.com). By means of GOOGLE (distributed on hundreds of millions of web-users) there have determined rating indicators of reciting of the resource and the amount of document with references to the considered IR. Table 1 lists legal Internet resources in the field of the constitutional justice, sorted on rating indicators got by means of instrument of Google.com (on November 15, 2007). The first ten of the most qualitative and called by IR are the sites of: the Supreme Court of Japan (180000), the Supreme Court of Brazil (170000), the Constitutional Council of France (13100), the European Court on human rights (130000), the Constitutional Court of Italy and the Supreme Court of the USA (115000), the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (113000), the Supreme Court of Mexico (82000). We should note a rather high rating (19 places) of the site of the Constitutional court of Armenia (32700), having the highest indicator among the countries of the former USSR (table 3). On the second rating place is the site of the Constitutional Court of the Lithuania (23400)(see table 3). On table 1 Lithuania occupies the 24-th place. The site of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine occupies the third place (19600), on the table 1 Ukraine occupies 27th place.

           Table 2 comprises sorted on the rating sites of 14 international legal institutes, commissions and associations. The absolute factor on rating among all the considered IR occupies the site of the office of the Sovereign Commissar on human rights of the UNO (1200000). The Site of the Venice Commission of Council of the Europe occupies the second place (70900). The Institute of the European constitutional law occupies the eighth rating place (764), the Conference European constitutional court occupies the 10 rating place (371). The last place on the site is occupied by the International association of the constitutional law (72).

           In the recent years there have been organized many international conferences on different problems of the constitutional justice. Sometimes efficiency of these activities is not high as it is connected with the difficulty of organization or displacement, with waste of time (or irrational use of time). We think that the possibilities of Internet today are such that it is possible to spare more attention to organization of scientific e-discussions on their beforehand worked out problem, as well as electronic seminars on this or that concrete problems, which have already become or can become the subject for consideration in the constitutional court. This new mechanism of the electronic dialogue can be opened, available to specialists, other public organizations, which will not only be able to communicate on such actual problems, but will organize interesting feedback with a person, a citizen, whose interests and rights must provide the constitutional courts. The electronic forum of the kind for specialists is organized by the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe.

           Thereby, it is possible to foresee that in the nearest years the decision of the specified problems, including, the development of virtual representation of the constitutional courts in network Internet, active using multilingual legal IT technologies, training at legal faculties of universities of jurists - specialists in the field of legal information technology and legal informatics, as well as electronic control, standardization of legal notions and terms will allow to realize the strategic concept of the uniform electronic constitutional justice in the global virtual of space.

           The literature

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