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Aust'n courts facing growing backlog of cases: report

Xinhua, January 31, 2017 Adjust font size:

Australian courts are facing a growing backlog of cases with many taking more than a year to process, a report has found.

The report, released by the Productivity Commission on Tuesday, revealed that a quarter of pending cases in the New South Wales (NSW) supreme and district cases are older than 12 months.

The backlog is a significant increase from the 18 percent of cases older than 12 months in 2014-15, 19 percent in 2013-14 and 11 percent in 2012-13.

As of June 30 2016, NSW had 4,192 matters waiting to be heard by a court, 1,017 of which had been waiting for at least a year.

In Tasmania, almost 29 percent of criminal cases were older than 12 months, followed by South Australia (25.5 percent) and the Australian Capital Territory (23.1 percent).

The Australian national benchmark recommends that no more than 10 percent of court lodgements pending completion should be more than 12 months old, a benchmark that only Western Australia (WA) and the Northern Territory (NT) fell within.

However, the report noted that the NSW supreme court was waiting to hear a higher proportion of murder and manslaughter cases which made the direct comparison of state-by-state statistics impossible.

It also said that the increase in the number of cases awaiting a hearing in Victoria for over 24 months (from one in 2014-15 to 12 in 2015-16) related to complex, related cases involving foreign bribery allegations.

A simultaneous report into Australia's corrective services found that the cost per day of holding prisoners had dropped nation-wide.

Nationally, 158 U.S. dollars was spent per prisoner per day in 2015-16, compared to 173 U.S. dollars per prisoner per day the previous year. Endit