ANON — Croatia's AI tool for automated pseudonymisation of judicial decisions

ANON addresses the historical backlog of unpublished Croatian court decisions, aiming to improve public access to legal information while ensuring compliance with EU personal data protection standards.

ANON integrates directly with eSpis, Croatia's national court case management system. For first-instance judgments it automatically identifies personal names, addresses, identification numbers and other data, replaces them with pseudonyms, and proposes indexed publication on Croatia's national court decisions search engine. For higher-instance courts, ANON facilitates anonymisation but requires final human verification by authorised personnel. Roll-out was preceded by an awareness and change-management workshop (March 2024, Zagreb) for judges, court advisors and staff.

By January 2025, ANON was officially operationalised across Croatia's first-instance court system. The Council of Europe has cited Croatia's approach as a model for the Western Balkans region, and there is no record of adverse outcomes to date.

Human-in-the-loop verification for higher-instance courts and extensive prior judicial training are cited as safeguards; the initiative is funded under Croatia's National Recovery and Resilience Plan 2021–2026 and reviewed by the Council of Europe's Department for the Implementation of Human Rights.