Coalition statement in reaction to scheduling of an extraordinary meeting of the Conference of Judges
The Coalition for Independent and Transparent Judiciary has long highlighted a number of problems and challenges faced by the Georgian judicial system, including and especially the need of meaningful judiciary reforms in different directions, which is critical for ensuring independence and impartiality of courts and individual judges. Among these reforms are: introduction of a system of judicial appointments/selections that will practice fairness and transparency; creating a system of judicial disciplinary liability with safeguards against abusing and based on the principles of respecting judge’s independence and objectivity; introduction of a rule of random case assignment as an important guarantee for right of an individual to have his or her case reviewed by an independent and fair judges.
The judiciary itself and the judges should be concerned with creating independent judiciary and empowering individual judges. The judges’ stakes in independence of the judiciary are naturally high, compared to interest of other branches of the government. For this reason, the coalition believes that it is the Conference of Judges that should play a pivotal role in this regard.
Notably, previous meeting of the Conference did not follow its agenda as in the course of the meeting the Secretary of the High Council of Justice (HCoJ) arbitrarily removed hearing of HCoJ Secretary’s report from the agenda and used the conference as a platform for making statements in support of his candidacy for judgeship. For these reasons, we urge XVI extraordinary meeting of the conference scheduled to be held on February 1, 2016, to use this opportunity for a result-oriented business discussion about the need of meaningful reforms in the judiciary, including changes in the system of disciplinary proceedings, making the e-system for random assignation of cases operational in a timely manner, and changes in rules for selection and appointment of judges.
We urge the conference to demand:
• from the High Council of Justice to ensure timely implementation of the foregoing legislative changes and to actively participate in the process of elaboration of the new regulations
• from the Ministry of Justice of Georgia and the Parliament of Georgia to ensure that draft laws within the third wave of judiciary reforms reflect proposals for a meaningful reform and to adopt the draft laws immediately;
The Coalition for Independent and Transparent Judiciary stands ready to support the judges’ call for a meaningful judiciary reform, in order to achieve fairness and independence of the judiciary and individual judges.