Supreme Court President and head of the Civil Chamber, Alberto Martínez Simón, met Monday with international experts to share experiences on modernizing civil justice in Paraguay. The meeting included Dr. Gustavo Calvinho from the University of Austral in Buenos Aires; Dr. Manuel González Castro from the National University of Córdoba; and Dr. Remberto Valdés from the University of Concepción in Chile.
Joel Melgarejo, a member of the Civil and Commercial Court of Appeals of the Central Judicial District, also attended. The goal is to form a working group to analyze Paraguay's civil procedural system using comparative models, including the Adversarial Civil Procedure Code recently approved in the province of Neuquén, Argentina.
According to Melgarejo, the project plans to use statistical data and judicial management to produce a technical diagnosis identifying strengths, challenges, and opportunities for improvement, both from a regulatory and organizational perspective. Among the topics discussed were the incorporation of technological tools and the redesign of processes to reduce administrative burden and speed up case processing.
Participants agreed that modernizing justice requires not only legislative reforms but also an interdisciplinary approach integrating law, administration, engineering, and technology, allowing judges and staff to focus efforts on conflict resolution.
Remberto Valdés highlighted Chile's experience with procedural reforms, noting that the most successful changes were accompanied by management structures that separate judicial functions from administrative tasks. Manuel González Castro argued that adversarial procedural models strengthen the role of the parties, promote oral proceedings, and reduce processing times, in line with constitutional principles and due process guarantees.
Gustavo Calvinho emphasized the importance of simplifying procedural communication mechanisms and praised the technological advances of Paraguay's judiciary. “Paraguay's digital case file system is better than any we have in Argentina,” he said.