KOSICE, April 11, (WEBNOVINY) — The plenum of Slovakia’s Constitutional Court in Kosice agreed in a closed session on Wednesday to accept for further proceedings a motion filed by former Minister of Justice Lucia Zitanska for disciplinary action against the President of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Stefan Harabin. Spokeswoman for the Constitutional Court Anna Pancurova informed about this decision. However, the Constitutional Court did not accept the former minister’s demand for a temporary suspension of Stefan Harabin as a judge in connection with this proposal, and her another proposal to link this proposal for disciplinary action with her other disciplinary motions.
Former Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska filed four proposals for disciplinary proceedings with the Constitutional Court against the President of the Supreme Court Stefan Harabin. The Constitutional Court already upheld the disciplinary action for his refusal to allow an audit of the Ministry of Finance at the Supreme Court. It punished Harabin by reducing his salary by seventy percent for one year. Subsequently, Harabin sued the Slovak Republic at the European Court of Human Rights. The Constitutional Court is yet to decide on three other proposals for disciplinary action against Harabin. One case concerns his change of the schedule of work of judges and a violation of the duty of random assignment of files to judges. In this case, the Constitutional Court interrupted disciplinary proceedings and waits for a decision of the European Court of Human Rights, to which Harabin directed his complaint.
The Constitutional Court today decided on the objection of bias of Constitutional Court judges Peter Brnak, Lubomir Dobrik, Milan Lalik raised by the Minister of Justice Lucia Zitnanska, and the objection of bias of Constitutional Court judges Juraj Horvath, Ludmila Gajdosikova, Ladislav Orosz, Jan Luby and Sergei Kohut raised by Stefan Harabin. The Constitutional Court agreed that judges Dobrik, Horvath, and Lalik will be excluded from case. The court did not exclude judges Brnak, Gajdosikova and Luby from the case. It rejected the proposal of Harabin to exclude judges Sergei Kohut and Ladislav Orosz.
SITA