The first courts handled 1.9 million new cases last year, led by those involving drugs, personal loans and traffic law violations respectively, according to the Courts of Justice.
Of the total, 1.2 million were civil cases while the remaining 637,000 were criminal cases, said Sarawut Benjakul, secretary-general of the Courts of Justice.
The courts finished deliberating 1.7 million, or 88% of the total, during the year, he added.
The top five types of cases brought to the courts nationwide last year were drugs (345,000), personal loans (258,000), traffic (182,000), credit cards (170,000) and students’ loans (167,000), he said at a briefing on last year’s statistics on Friday.
During the year, the appeal courts also handled 60,000 cases, 54,000 of which were done. As well, the Supreme Court ruled on 17,000 of all 23,000 cases brought to it last year.
In all, 2 million cases were brought to all three tiers of the courts, 88% of which were done.
For arbitration, 150 disputes were settled, with total value of 105.4 billion baht.
During the year, 164 courts started using 6,500 ankle electronic-monitoring devices (EM). The top six types of cases in which the devices were used were drugs (37%), assets-related cases (21%), traffic violations (16%), cheques (13%), offences involving life and bodily harm (8%) and firearms (5%).
Last year, the courts also adopted technology to manage cases to cut costs and time. Among them were e-filing, e-notice, case information online services, electronic hearing recording system, transcribing system, teleconferencing system, electronic presentation system, among others.
