The Justice Studies Center of the Americas (JSCA) has issued its report on the Dominican court system for 2006-2007, according to Diario Libre. Justice Studies Center of the Americas/Centro de Estudios de Justicia de las Americas, Santiago, is a Chile-based agency funded through the Organization of American States and focused on issues of justice-system reform in Latin America. The report says that in relation to the number of judges in 2004, the courts only increased their numbers by 2%. However, the number of people working in the courts increased by 12%, and the number of people working in support of the courts increased by 59%. The report also gives salary information for the different levels of courts, as well as the number of cases solved during the timeframe and the percentage of cases by category. Business, family and civil actions make up 42% of the caseload. One of the keynotes of the study is the decreasing number of cases, both criminal and civil. In the case of civil suits, the number fell from 130,000 cases in 2003 to 39,000 by the end of 2006. With regard to criminal cases, the number of cases handled by the courts fell from 78,000 in 2003 to 2,190 in 2006.
For the report, see the English section of http://www.cejamericas.org/