BRATISLAVA, January 18, (WEBNOVINY) — The newly appointed chairman of the Michalovce District Court Martin Stretavsky has withdrawn a proposal for disciplinary proceedings against a judge of this court, Stanislav Sojka. The previous chairman of the court, the controversial judge Jozef Sorocina, who retired last year, filed the proposal to start disciplinary proceedings against Sojka in June 2008. Based on the decision of the then Justice Minister Stefan Harabin, Sojka was temporarily banned from executing his profession of a judge in the same month for the maximum possible period of 24 months.
Stretavsky said that after having thoroughly judged the case he came to the conclusion that at the time of filing the given disciplinary proposal, there existed no lawful reasons to initiate disciplinary proceedings against the judge. According to him, the disciplinary motion, which blames the judge of acting unlawfully when he wrote a letter to the president of the state is at odds with the valid legal order in Slovakia „Neither provisions of a law valid in the Slovak Republic nor judges‘ ethical principles are known to me that would prevent a judge from turning to another constitutional official with a letter of a private character,“ added the court chairman.
A Disciplinary Court found Stanislav Sojka, a judge of the District Court in Michalovce guilty in October 2009 of a serious offense by writing a letter to President Ivan Gasparovic. The disciplinary senate of the Supreme Court said that the letter to President Ivan Gasparovic contained many halftruths, lies and invectives against Sorocina, defense lawyer Kus and the then Justice Minister Harabin. It punished Sojka by a fifty-percent reduction of his salary for six months. In his letter to President Gasparovic, Sojka described the disciplinary proceedings he was facing based on the initiative of Michalovce Court Chairman Sorocina. Sorocina proposed to punish judge Sojka by the strictest possible penalty, namely to remove him from his office for allegedly informing third-party people about the removal of lawyer Juraj Kus from one of the cases he was deciding on as a judge. The disciplinary panel however acquitted Sojka of the charges in another disciplinary motion against him in the case of alleged publication of the content of an appeal in the case, in which he was involved as a judge.
The already retired judge Sorocina is known from the case in which he was accused because he awarded damages to a wife of an Allianz insurance company client of SKK 30 million for bodily harm in a traffic accident and he later commissioned an executor to collect the compensation from the insurance company. Criminal courts and a disciplinary court eventually acquitted him. He was successfully in a lawsuit against the Justice and Interior Ministries and several media that informed about the case. He also filed disciplinary charges against five other judges.
SITA