Information held by the Ministry of Justice

The Ministry of Justice holds a wide range of information related to its functions and its decision-making processes.  This includes our work in supporting the courts and tribunals, leading the Justice Sector, administering the legal aid system, negotiating Treaty of Waitangi settlements, developing justice policy, managing the Public Defence Service, collecting fines and reparation, providing criminal conviction history checks and funding a range of services to help people going through the justice system.  We publish many corporate documents on our website and they can be found on our Publication Finder.

The information we hold includes:

  • Records and information relating to our functions and responsibilities, including the services we deliver to the public and the advice we provide to Ministers. Our records include briefings and advice to Ministers, and internal information and records relating to the development and delivery of services and the operation of the Ministry itself.
  • Separate or collated administrative information and statistics taken primarily from case management systems to enable the Ministry to efficiently budget, plan, and administer the court system.
  • Case-level information that is combined with Police, Corrections, and other government agency data to support policy formation, statistics, and research.
  • Statistics (for example, counts, averages, trends) and performance measures (for example, to assess achievement against operating targets) about court processes and case outcomes.
  • The Ministry also maintains custodianship of legacy file sets from the Department of Justice, the Department for Courts and the old Ministry of Justice, all of which are being managed through to final disposition under the Public Records Act 2005. Many of these have been transferred to, and are now available from, Archives New Zealand(external link).

NOTE: The records of courts and tribunals are not subject to the Official Information Act 1982. Access to these is dealt with by separate legislation and court rules(external link).

We also hold several documents related to our decision-making process, including:

For more information about these policies and documents, contact: OIA@justice.govt.nz

 
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