Law Reporting
The Law Reporting department is a department of the Judiciary of Uganda and is currently operating at the Judicial Studies Institute. The department carries out various activities including on line publication of case law and laws of Uganda. These cases are published on the Uganda Legal Information Institute website.
The Uganda legal information institute (ULII) is an internet facility that provides the public with legal information relating to Uganda, with a view of promoting and supporting the rule of law.
ULII publishes legal information that is:-
1. Legally significant decisions of courts
2. Legislation
3. Treaties and some publicly available secondary legal material created by public bodies for purposes of public access for example the JLOS (Justice Law and Order Sector) and the ULRC (Uganda Law Reform Commission).
The decisions of court that are published are from all courts of record, that is; the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, Constitutional Court, High Court, Commercial Court, as well as CADER(Centre for Arbitration and Dispute Resolution) together with an electronic citation for each decision.
The ULII website enables legal research where one can find precedents by key words, Case name, and case number, and subject matter, date of judgment, document title or legislation title. Currently all the cases that are being uploaded have case notes and case summaries.
Objectives:
1. Improve on-going collection of case law in electronic format from courts of record
2. Ensure completeness of the database for covered years for all courts
3. Scanning of older collection
4. To digest the judgments to enhance the textual search capacity online
5. Improve use of the website by conducting training and promotion
6. Publish law reports from the case law already online.
7. Publication of treaties entered into by the government of Uganda with other government and international organisations.
Access to Law.
Online access through the internet is the medium that is utilized to provide access to Uganda's primary and secondary legal materials on the following principles of the declaration of free access to law;
1. Publication of legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity; maximizing access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law.
2. Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all free of charge.
3. Independent non-profit organisations have the right to publish public legal information and the government bodies that create or control that information should provide access to it so that it can be published.
In the manner of the world wide movement of legal information institutes, it was proposed that the Law Reporting office organize to:
i) Publish via the internet primary materials including statutes from government/parliament, case law from all courts of record and treaties entered into by government of Uganda whether ratified by parliament or not.
ii) Publish secondary legal materials like reports of the Uganda Law Reform Commission and other bodies.
iii) Provide free, full and anonymous public access to the said information.
