Photo: RNZ / Dan Cook
The chief district court judge is confident justice sector agencies will do what they can to speed up court cases.
Judge Heemi Taumaunu has set new timeframe targets outlining when cases should be completed, based on the seriousness of the charges. He wants to achieve a 90 percent success rate, but said that depended on other justice sector agencies improving their processes.
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When asked whether there were any incentives or repercussions to ensure the agencies kept up their end of the deal, Judge Taumaunu said everyone involved shared the same end goal.
"The key incentive is when you think about the reason why we're doing it. It's because everyone is concerned about the people who are at the heart of all of this, the people waiting for their cases, that is the key incentive. Because that's the key incentive, there's been commitment, definite commitment, across the sector to try and reduce delays," he said.
"It wouldn't make a lot of sense for the head of court to set that standard without ensuring that the wider justice system that it depends on is committed to supporting the court to achieve that standard."
While the District Court was reliant on other agencies to help it meet its goals, Judge Taumaunu said it would also do everything it could to make its own processes more efficient.
"There's a constitutional boundary involved in this, and it relates back to the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. So in terms of setting a court performance standard like the one that I have set, only the head of the court involved is able to do so," he said.
"In the District Court we will be giving it all we've got, throwing everything at it to try and achieve this."
However, speeding up the system and reducing the backlog could not come at the expense of fair trial rights, Judge Taumaunu said.
"The idea of timely justice and the concepts that those two words bring, they have to be seen together. So yes, we want to reduce delays but at the same time we must ensure that the fair trial rights are protected and we also need to ensure that we are still delivering justice in the court ... there's a balance to be struck here."
The new timelines had been set based on "significant analysis" of how long different types of cases took to go through the court, both here and internationally.