The Institute of Innovation, Technology and Justice (IFITEJ), which is part of the Federal Board of Courts and Superior Courts (Ju.Fe.Jus.), and the technology team of the Buenos Aires Supreme Court launched the Federal Justice Bus in November. This is a set of micro-services that allows courts to exchange electronic documents, with secure traceability, and will eventually enable the automation of judicial processes.
In addition to involving all the Judiciary Branches of Argentina, it will allow the intervention of public agencies that participate directly or indirectly in the evidentiary process, hearings and homologations that characterize the work of judges and lawyers.
Gustavo Pérez Villar, Undersecretary of Information Technology of the Supreme Court of Justice, highlighted the federal character of the project, initiated in 2019. The bus components were developed by the participating provinces. This "decoupled" character allows that, in the event of service availability problems, the participating agencies are not dragged down by the failures. When they enter the system, they interoperate with an edge service where authentication takes place; they then move on to the message platform between participating agencies, which generates events (facts, news) on the bus. Each service in turn has its own database and the function of sealer in the Argentine Federal Blockchain (BFA, Blockchain Federal Argentina) or LacChain.
Two next steps. The Justice interoperability tool with public and private entities is already operational, with two active powers so far: the Judiciary of Mendoza and the one of the province of Buenos Aires.
In addition to the work in adhering other jurisdictions, IFITEJ and the Supreme Court of Buenos Aires are working on two new stages of the project. The development of external offices aims to integrate the digital exchange of reports and automatic or manual processes with external agencies; and documents from financial institutions, among others. The next stage of operational automation aims to reduce the workload in courts, with automatic consultation on file statuses, reports on the registry of delinquent alimony payers, records of arrest warrants, by automating offices and files that involve reports or manual queries within agencies.
Bus components. These are the bus applications by province:
Management Agency (Chaco): manages the life cycle of an agency and all its dependencies within the bus, including its policies (e.g., whether it uses digital signature or not).
Electronic document broker (Province of Buenos Aires): Validates documents sent from one agency to another (digital or electronic signature, quality control). In case the document has errors, it enables the issuing agency to be notified of the error and correct it.
Digital Notary Public (Mendoza): Supervises all bus transactions. In the event of a transaction rejection or approval, it registers it in the Argentine Federal Blockchain, generates a ticket and delivers it to the "ends" so that they are notified of its delivery or rejection.
Edge service or Gateway (Chubut): Standard interface that is exposed to users. All the agencies adhered to the Bus interact with this single interface.
Electronic Documents Bot: Facilitates the integration of any Judicial Branch seeking to join. It receives documents and issues responses.
Sealer / Blockchain Integration (under development): It consists of the service of sealing hashes in Blockchain. Aims that the provinces that want to incorporate Blockchain, do it through the Justice Bus.
Web portal (Córdoba): Designed so that the systems of the agencies "talk" to each other. Those agencies that wish to do so can log in to the portal.