Secret justice in Germany? Why so many judgments remain virtually invisible

A judgment is public—but you still can't find it

In principle, anyone is allowed to listen in the courtroom. That is intentional: justice should not take place behind closed doors. Sounds transparent, right? But there is a catch to this transparency: after the trial, much of it disappears into thin air. This is because German courts are not usually required to automatically publish their decisions in public databases. Whether a judgment is published often depends on whether the individual judge considers it "important enough." A study by SWR Data Lab and ARD's legal editorial team has taken an in-depth look at this issue.

An example case from the SWR investigation shows exactly what this means in practice: Sebastian Marg was ordered to pay €1,000 in damages because a film was allegedly illegally downloaded and uploaded via his connection. His lawyer wanted to know: How does this court normally rule in such cases? Are there typical arguments? Are there similar judgments? The result: hardly anything could be found. And if you can't prepare, legal advice quickly becomes a shot in the dark.

Why missing judgments have real consequences

Anyone who cannot find comparable decisions has a problem—and not just lawyers. Citizens who want to know "what is customary in such cases" are also left out in the cold.

Lawyer Beata Hubrig sums it up: "This made it difficult for me to predict the outcome of the proceedings." This is not just an academic issue. It influences very concrete decisions: fight or settle? Take a risk or pay up? Without empirical data, advice becomes more cautious—or more expensive.

And even when judgments do appear somewhere, they often end up in private databases such as Juris or Beck Online. These can only be accessed via a paywall. Alternatively, you can request decisions from the court—sometimes for a fee and with a waiting period. For ordinary people, this is anything but "easily accessible."

The figure that sticks in the mind: only around four percent

The SWR analysis examined how many judgments from 2023 and 2024 by civil and administrative courts ended up in public, free-of-charge government databases. The result: on average, only about four percent. And there are extreme differences among them: some courts did not publish anything at all.

The situation is particularly dire in regional courts, where the rate was approximately 1.3 percent according to the analysis. At the same time, the highest courts (such as the Federal Court of Justice and the Federal Administrative Court) normally publish a great deal, often practically everything, according to the research. This means that the closer you are to everyday life, the less you will find. This is precisely where most people are likely to have dealings with the justice system.

"Case law doesn't count here" – true, but it still helps

A common objection: Germany is not the United Kingdom. We do not have "case law" in the sense that a court ruling automatically binds others. Sure. But that is only half the truth.

Even if judgments do not have the same effect as a law, they are still valuable:

• They show how courts think
• which arguments are convincing and which are not
• how high damage amounts often are
• whether judges tend to be strict or pragmatic

Even judges' and lawyers' associations are saying, in essence, that the low rate is a transparency issue. Fewer published decisions also means less accountability for government actions. And when people feel that they "can't see through it," trust quickly suffers.

The bottleneck is called anonymization—and AI is supposed to fix it

The main reason sounds trivial, but it is real: before judgments are published, names, addresses, and details must be redacted. This is often done by hand—a tedious, slow, and expensive process.

A few federal states are therefore turning to technology. In Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, there is a tool called "JANO" that uses AI to anonymize data. The idea: faster redaction, more publication, less paperwork.

The Federal Ministry of Justice also wants to increase the quota and is considering the next steps. And initiatives such as "Offene Urteile" (Open Judgments) are actively requesting decisions—with the ambitious goal of making a large number of judgments accessible in the long term without completely overwhelming the courts.

What we think about it

Four percent of judgments published—that's not "a little room for improvement." It's a system that is barely visible in everyday life. And that's dangerous at a time when trust in institutions is already shaky. When people get the feeling that the law is a black box, others fill the gap: with half-knowledge, TikTok tips, and pub myths.

Of course, publication takes work. But that's precisely why it seems absurd, frankly, that transparency often depends on whether a judge finds a ruling "relevant enough." Relevance isn't just about whether something is cited in textbooks. Relevance is also about whether it helps ordinary people understand what they're getting into.

AI anonymization is a positive step—as long as it doesn't just result in more PDF files being available online, but still untraceable, unstructured, and without a usable search function. Transparency does not mean "storing somewhere." Transparency means: traceable, comparable, understandable. And in this regard, Germany is currently more like a file cellar than a glass building.

Source: tagesschau.de