In 1920, the Brazilian jurist Rui Barbosa (1849-1923) affirmed that "delayed justice is not justice, but injustice qualified and manifest". Almost 100 years later, his words have inspired the new venture from Brazilian news site JOTA, which focuses on the country’s Judiciary. The bot Rui (@ruibarbot), which launched at the end of April, monitors and publishes via Twitter about slowness in the progress of proceedings before the Federal Supreme Court (STF for its acronym in Portuguese).
Every day, Rui Tweets about anniversaries of proceedings stalled in the country’s highest court. On April 25, for example, it warned that an action on punishment for a driver who flees after a traffic accident has been stalled in the Supreme Court for one year. The tweet gave rise to a report by JOTA itself on the process and the sluggishness in terms of progress.
The goal of the bot is precisely to direct the eyes of journalists and citizens to the bottlenecks of the Brazilian Judiciary, Felipe Recondo, co-founder and content director of JOTA and creator of the bot, told the Knight Center.
"The idea came up between 2014 and 2015, when we started JOTA," Recondo said. "The perception is that we covered judicial processes when there is a development, but the nature of the Judiciary, for various reasons - excessive processes, loopholes in legislation, excessive resources - is that the processes are often stalled." Their feeling, according to the journalist, was that they were only covering part of the story.
Coverage of stalled cases allows "the dysfunctionalities of the judiciary" to be revealed, Recondo said, and the exploration of various possible reasons for this sluggishness. "It may be a minister (justice) who is not giving the process the priority it may deserve; it may be the Public Prosecutor, who did not return the case and is still analyzing; the parties may be using legitimate resources but they may delay the decision ... We wanted to know where the bottlenecks are in each of these cases. The idea was to produce a kind of ‘negative’ coverage, also covering what is not moving forward."
Guilherme Jardim Duarte, JOTA data editor, has programmed Rui in Python, a programming language widely used by journalists on projects like this. He explained to the Knight Center that the bot is part of a list of 289 processes compiled by the JOTA team among the 43,000 that are in process at the Supreme Court. The robot looks at the court’s website every day, checks when each process on the list has been updated and, if one is reaching years or 180 or 270 days without movement, it Tweets about it.
"The only thing the bot does is see if the process is completing an anniversary [without movement]," Duarte said. "The rest is the reporter's job, to investigate and tell you what happened."
The list of processes monitored by the bot is the result of the JOTA team’s curation based on journalistic criteria, Recondo said. "We have looked at our coverage and seen what may have greater repercussions for legislation, economics, society, politics, etc." But the list is open to updates and suggestions from readers on other processes to be monitored. "It was immediate: as soon as the robot came on air the people began to write us saying 'you should follow this process.’ And we are open to it."
A valuable aspect of the project is that it is a generator of stories not only for JOTA, but for any journalist or outlet that follows Rui on Twitter and that is interested in some of the stalled processes that it highlights.
"We could have made a robot exclusively for us," Recondo said. "It would also be extremely relevant, but it would not fulfill the task which is also for social networks and people who may not read JOTA, but read other media, to have access to it." Being on Twitter, "anyone can access it, and whoever wants can write something in newspapers from anywhere in the country, based on that information," he said.
In addition to reporting on JOTA’s site, Rui has already generated repercussions among the STF ministers (justices) themselves. Some of them commented to Recondo about the bot. One justice said that JOTA should expand the project to the entire judiciary. Two others already expressed fear; one did not go into detail, but another made a reservation about magistrates being blamed for slowness in the proceedings. "I said that the robot will just Tweet that the process is stalled. We're going to write articles and explain why and where it is stalled," Recondo said.
There were also taunts from other employees at the STF, he said. "They said 'the way it is here, you're going to whistle like a siren'. I replied, 'Well, if that's the case, we have to discuss the model of the courts, not Rui's model,'" the journalist laughed.
New Ruis are on the horizon for JOTA. "We want to expand with the courts," Duarte said. "The Superior Court of Justice (STJ) is the court that everyone thinks of next. In terms of legal issues, it is our superior court. The STJ is quite important and is sometimes forgotten and has several interesting and important cases there."
According to Duarte, another project planned by the site’s team is data analysis regarding all the processes that are on the STF site - about two million, between finalized processes and those still in progress.
For Recondo, data journalism is practically a requirement of judicial coverage. According to the National Justice Council, in 2016 almost 110 million cases went through the Brazilian judiciary. "To do such coverage, either you have data or you plunge into 100 million processes, and you will not be able to get out," he said.
"We want to do evidence-based journalism, and that evidence can sometimes be measured," said the director of JOTA, for whom readers have demanded the presentation of evidence in journalism. "The more we are rooted in data, the less people will rely on guesswork, the reader will be better informed.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
