BRATISLAVA, January 2, (WEBNOVINY) — Work of judges in Slovakia will come be under more public scrutiny. From January 1, 2012, the second package of laws enacting changes in judiciary comes into force. The laws introduce changes directly to the work of judges, to disciplinary proceedings, and to Judicial Council sessions. The judges are to undergo a compulsory evaluation of their work and observing judicial ethics every five years in order to create pressure for more quality in the judiciary. “We need to be aware of the fact that judges hold their offices for life. All other offices have a system allowing for some evaluation, accountability by having some definite [election] term,” underlined Justice Minister Lucia Zitnanska (SDKU-DS).
The evaluation will be complex, containing a quantitative review together with rating of quality of a judge’s work. Every year, chairmen of the courts should also elaborate a public quantitative evaluation of every judge’s work. Both the chairman and the public will thus be able to know for example how many delays in court proceedings every judge has. However, according to Justice Ministry State Secretary Maria Kolikova, evaluations should not be a tool for launching disciplinary proceedings, but a feedback. Judges who would fail to pass three evaluations in their careers would lose their offices as incompetent for holding them. Minister Zitnanska says that the primary intention of the evaluations is not to punish but to motivate, as no judge would enjoy achieving worse results than their colleagues.
Judges will be able to file a complaint against an evaluation they will not identify themselves with. Contested evaluations will be examined by a disciplinary senate.
„Additionally, from the start of this year, court decisions will be published [on the Internet — SITA note], that means that the public will have the possibility to search individual decisions by the name of a judge,“ Justice Minister Zitnanska said.
SITA