Morten Bergsmo from PRIO and Ralph Hecksteden of the University of Saarland in Germany have been awarded the Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics in 2008 by the German Association for Computing in the Judiciary and the German-language legal information service provider ‘juris GmbH’ for the development of the Case Matrix.
The Dieter Meurer prize is awarded to information technology projects with a high degree of practical relevance.
The Case Matrix has been created by Morten Bergsmo during his time at the International Criminal Court (ICC), and its programme and infrastructure have been further developed by the Institute for Law and Informatics at Saarland University in Germany pursuant to directions from the ICC. The Case Matrix is a unique, law-driven case management tool that provides an explanation of the elements of crimes and legal requirements of modes of liability for all crimes in the ICC Statute, serves as a user’s guide to how one could prove international crimes and modes of liability, and provides a database service to organise and present the potential evidence in a case. With the aid of the Case Matrix, the presence of all legal elements of crimes can be verified, so that even the most complicated cases become better organised and more transparent for all participants, and gaps in the chains of proof are self-evident.
For further information on the Dieter Meurer Prize, see https://www.edvgt.de/pages/dieter-meurer-foerderpreis-rechtsinformatik/dieter-meurer-foerderpreis-2008-english.php and for further information about the Case Matrix, see http://www.icc-cpi.int/library/ICC-CaseMatrix_ENG.pdf .
