Bureaucracy arrgh

[luzula]

So I have been involved in various court cases as the representative of my environmental organization in the last few years, since I am one of the spokespersons. (This does not mean I write the legal arguments...). Being the representative has so far just meant that I handle the correspondence.

Anyway, one of our cases has now advanced through the three levels of the Swedish court system and ended up in the EU court. Wow, sudden culture clash: to send in documents to them electronically you need a login to their electronic system. To get that, you print out and fill in a form along with some document proving you are indeed the representative in the case, and then you send these forms to them by mail and they process the forms. And then hopefully you get your login.

In the Swedish courts you just email them your documents. WTF is your problem with email, EU court?? I mean, theoretically without those hoops I guess it would be easier for anyone to email them and pretend to be me, but Swedish courts don't seem to have problems with that happening.

I complained about this to my German flatmate and he was all: you mean you can just email the court in Sweden? Obviously customs vary...

ETA: ..and now I just got an email from a lawyer in another environmental organization who said he found the process of getting such a login to be "horribly complicated". /o\

Comments

[seascribble]

This is like when I moved to Canada and all of the licensing had to be ORIGINAL PAPERWORK sent from my previous licensing bodies/schools/employers. Nothing could be emailed or faxed. (why is anybody still faxing things in 2019 anyway, but it would have been preferable to MAIL).

Anyway, I hope it's not horrible.

[luzula]

We ended up just sending the documents in a letter, which was better than the alternative.

Original paperwork, that sounds like such a pain in the ass. I mean, I assume you want to keep your original paperwork so...you'd ask the school for a new one?

[melannen]

in the USA a lot of courts still require faxes!

[luzula]

Faxes, that did not even occur to me.

Also, I have realized that it is possible we will have to go to Luxemburg to actually address the court, which sounds scary.

[antisoppist]

One of my clients seems to have the contract for translating documents required in court cases across quite a bit of Sweden and what I get sent is PDFs of emails which I then have to send back in English in Word. Lots of very fiddly typing and formatting, but it takes me back to the days when all my source documents came as faxes. It would also be nice if all the Swedish district courts followed some sort of template for their letters but no, they are all different!

[luzula]

Hmm. Why do the Swedish courts need to translate things from Swedish to English?

[antisoppist]

When I translated a report from Sweden on the treatment of speakers of minority languages, it said the law had changed so that people now have to receive official information in a language they understand, so it might be to do with that.

I've translated several court documents granting divorce between a Swedish and non-Swedish spouse, e-mails in divorce cases submitted in Swedish by one spouse which are to be translated for the other spouse, together with a letter from the court asking them to respond, e-mails where a Swedish spouse wanted to adopt the child of their non-Swedish spouse, a cohabitation agreement between a Swedish and non-Swedish partner... Stuff between Swedes and English-speaking foreigners where it's reasonable that both parties clearly know what is going on really.

I also turned down 6 pages where the Swedish tax office was trying to get unpaid tax out of someone who had left the country because financial legislation is really not my thing.

[luzula]

Ah, okay! That makes sense.