Back in 2018, I was working in the BMBF-funded joint project PANDORA, where we, among other things, were interested in how German courts acknowledge the assumed political motivation of defendants in documented violent acts (which so far have always been criminal charges). As Parisot et al. state, ‘court files represent decisions that have important consequences for society’ (Parisot et al 2021: 8). They offer insights into ‘a reality that is inter-subjectively produced, and which is central for evolvement, maintenance and development’ of central societal rules and norms (2021:8; author’s translation). Focusing on terrorism trials, Boegelein et al. add: ‘court proceedings [and court files as their written result] juxtapose the ideational and narrative constructs of terrorist subjects and their imagined physical, psychological, and social attributes with the actual men and women who stand trial for engaging in terrorist activities and who rarely correspond to those imagined constructions’ (2022: 2).

Court files are open to the public with some limitations (Pingen & Steger 2023). These limitations are grounded in the federal law on the protection of privacy (Datenschutzgrundverordnung, DSGVO) and archival laws of the German federal states. Yet, researchers hardly write about potential difficulties to gain access to court files (Pingen & Steger 2023). This post is based on my experiences to access court data. Difficulties I have faced in our research project have been twofold: a) finding the relevant information about past or future trials on terrorism or political violence; and b) gaining actual access to the required court files.

Accessing information on future trials

Finding the information on relevant past and present trials is quite exhausting, frustrating and very time-consuming. In my experience, newsletters containing information on future trials or changes of any kind in ongoing trials are either non-accessible to researchers as third-party (different from journalists) observers or not reliable. So, what we did in our search is fourfold:

1. In the rare case the prosecutor in those trials is the federal prosecutor general (e.g., terrorism trials according to German law), we would check the federal prosecutor general’s (GBA) website for press releases on arrest warrants, indictments, and time and place (i.e., the responsible court) these trials would take place (usually only higher state courts).
2. If we would not find this information in step one or we do not look for terrorism trials, the best and only option is to conduct a desk search with key words that fit our research question best. If we were lucky, we would find media coverage of trials taking place in lower-level German courts in national and local daily newspapers (see also Pingen & Steger 2023). We also scanned databases provided by civil society initiatives, such as the ‘Mut gegen rechte Gewalt’ database by the Amadeu-Antonio foundation. Such databases have the advantage in that they provide a perspective on political violence that is independent from security agencies and usually take a more victim-related approach to incidents. But they have the general problem that they usually lack sustainable funding and hence run only for a limited time or focus on a particular topic or place. With this option also comes the risk that one still does not find the information needed to identify an actual trial because only a few reported incidents are taken to court.
3. Third, we would continue our investigation on the respective court’s website or press releases or call them to ask for more specific information about ongoing or future trials. Researchers need to actively follow up on press releases of the various Higher Regional Courts to know when a respective trial will take place, and one also has to bear in mind that the different courts have different policies on how much information they share and how much in advance.
4. There is a fourth option, which is rather a further obstacle: researchers may still not be able to attend an ongoing trial, if the public interest is so high that journalists occupy most of the seats foreseen for observers. I have not experienced a procedure for researchers to apply for accreditation. Both, journalists and researchers are considered public interest parties (although the criteria to count as one group or another are rather fluid and opaque), and usually journalists are given higher priority to visit trials.

Accessing court files

Access to court files needs a different approach from the one outlined above in the way that they imply that a trial is in the past and closed. Researchers are permitted access to files of finished trials only. But, compared to accessing information on current trials, the process of gathering the necessary information needed to apply for access may be even more difficult. If the trial was closed not too long ago, information may still be available on the court’s website (how far back depends on the individual court), including the file reference number. This number and the defendant’s name are essential to apply for the file at the responsible public prosecutor’s office (see also Pingen & Steger 2023).

Researchers applying for court files need to argue in their application why they need access to the files, i.e., what the public interest is that they investigate in their project. In our joint project, we included a data management plan as well as a support letter of the project PI of our research institution (see also Pingen & Steger 2023) and frequently communicated with the responsible office at the GBA beforehand.

We successfully applied, but we were not always granted access to all the data we were interested in. Rather, it was dependent on the individual court and, seemingly more importantly, its level (federal, state, local levels) whether and which parts of court files we would be allowed access to. To receive files from the GBA, several trips to Karlsruhe (where the GBA is placed) by several project teams were necessary to copy files in place. We also received the support of employees in Karlsruhe who screened the copied files, blackened them if necessary for private data protection and mailed them back to our project team, where we digitalized every single page to finally process the analysis on an offline PC to meet the very hight security demands of our data management plan.

But files of terrorism trials may be specific. In the process of data collection, we were sent court files by lower-level courts in packages with the request to send them back when we were done. In retrospective, I am convinced this much easier access was made possible for two reasons: we could refer to our data management plan that still guaranteed highest security measures and to the trust of the federal prosecutor’s office when we mentioned in our cover letters to lower-level courts that we had received court files from the former.

In the end, some tips…

Summarizing, access to court or trial-related files is very time-consuming and not always successful, and one needs to take this into account when applying for funding. In practice, researchers would either need more staff or more time (both hard to justify in applications) or need to rework their research question (hard to justify in your final report) to be able to do courtroom research.

References

Boegelein, N., Eppert, K., Roth, V. & A. Schmidt-Kleinert. 2022. Courtroom ethnography in the context of terrorism research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21: 1-11.

Parisot, V., Zuccato-Doutlik, M. & U. Zartler. 2021. Gerichtsakten als Daten soziologischer Familienforschung: Methodologie und Methode für ein noch wenig erschlossenes Datenmaterial. FQS: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, 3: Art. 9.

Pingen, A. & A.-K. Steger. 2023. Unter der Lupe – Der Zugang zu Gerichtsentscheidungen in Deutschland. Recht und Zugang, 2: 205-222.