PLAIN LANGUAGE AND HOW TO COMMUNICATE BETTER WITH OUR CITIZENS (WE ARE TRYING!)
DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT WE SAY?
T
he importance of clarity in the justice communication with the citizens makes it essential to strengthen the collaboration with the judicial system by promoting new models of communication between the court and the citizen, in order to encourage the use of plain language, accessible to recipients, especially in the citations and notifications sent by the courts. With this objective as a priority, the Portuguese Ministry of Justice, through the Directorate-General for Justice Policy (DGPJ), began to implement Measure 118 in 2016, in the context of the Closer Justice Plan https://justicamaisproxima. justica.gov.pt/, tending to simplify the language used in communications between the court and the citizen, especially in the citations and notifications that constitute the acts that usually make known the existence of an action or fact in court, or possibly call someone to court. The need to implement this measure is immense, both for its potential results, in terms of greater clarity in understanding the information conveyed, and for the universe of recipients covered. The difficulty in understanding the technical language used by the courts is one of the effects that is sought to reduce, better integrating the citizens in the structure of the justice functioning and making them more aware of their rights and duties. One of the challenges of this process is the ability to simplify the legal language without losing the due technicality in the form produced. The selection of the models of acts to be simplified took into account the greater frequency of their use. In view of the complexity and specificity of the task of language simplification, DGPJ contracted
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