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How can courts be made more efficient? |
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Judicial corruption, inefficiency undermine rule of law In Serbia, the salary (€450/month) of lower-court judges is too low to attract lawyers to the bench. In Bulgaria’s courts, winning claimants find it exceedingly difficult to get their judicially-ordered rewards: currently, 380,000 judgements await enforcement. In Albania, a public opinion survey ranked judges as the third most corrupt in society, after customs officials and parliamentarians. The need to increase trust in, and respect for courts in countries in transition was the topic of a legal roundtable held on 23 May during the EBRD’s 2005 Annual Meeting in Belgrade, Serbia. “In transition countries, courts have gone through a lot of changes since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,” said Michel Nussbaumer, head of the EBRD’s legal transition team and chair of the roundtable. Laws have changed “For many judges working today, the situation is totally different from what it was when they started their jobs. Under the old regime, the whole governance structure of these countries was based on the enforcement of the interest of the working class, represented by the Communist Party. There was no need for a commercial dispute resolution mechanism. The function of the courts was mainly non-economic. “In the early 1990s, new laws were enacted by local governments and suddenly the judges were asked to fulfil totally new roles, enforcing private rights and contracts …In many cases judges are not familiar with commercial legislation and the concepts underlying it, such as corporate governance and insolvency. In addition, there is the problem of corruption and in some cases, government interference.” Justice is not working “In society, there is a gut feeling that justice is not working properly in a number of states,” said Roberto Lamponi, director of legal cooperation at the Council of Europe whose members include 20 of the EBRD’s 27 countries of operation. The various speakers said that, across the region, the administration of justice suffered from inefficiency and delays, lack of training for court personnel, and corruption. Said Mr Lamponi: “From our discussions with the judicial community, politicians and citizens’ representatives, we believe that if people are told they have to wait one year (for a court decision) because that’s the time it takes, they are prepared to do so provided that at the end of the one year, they do have a decision. What is intolerable is…procedures that go on forever, when the end of the tunnel is never in sight.” Improvements in courts’ administrative efficiency would go a long way in addressing citizens’ scepticism about judicial process. For example, this includes:
Dusan Protic, director of Serbia’s Judicial Training Centre, noted that his country did not really start on the path toward democracy until 1999 with the fall of Slobodan Milosevic whose demise was encouraged by many of the country’s senior judges. Those judges started the training centre in 2002, before which time there had been no systematic professional development for court officials. Since then, 230 training sessions have been held with 6,700 participants. However, there is still work to be done to train the entire corps of 2500 judges, 700 prosecutors and 11,000 court administrators, he noted. Given that much assistance to legal reform and judicial education is funded by foreign governments, several speakers mentioned the need for training to be coordinated between donors and tailored to the local reality. Mr Protic said in Serbia this is achieved in part by senior judges who, in hearing appeals, often identify problems requiring attention in lower courts. Knowing what judges need to learn is imperative in maximising the impact of training funds, said Nejib Boussedra of the International Development Law Organisation. “What does a judge sitting in bankruptcy cases need to know? Does he need to be trained on ways of maintaining order in his court? I don’t think so. Does he need to understand better the balance sheets provided to him? He definitely does.” Making sure local court officials feel ownership of and respect for training and other aspects of judicial reform “are the winning cards”, he added. Corruption undermines justice Different ways in which parties can corrupt the courts were discussed: judges can be bribed or threatened by claimants, defendants or government officials; court administrators may be paid to direct cases to pliant judges; expert witnesses may be nominated or eliminated by corrupt judges who want to ensure only one particular opinion is heard in the court. Increasing their salaries will “deprive judges of an excuse for accepting bribes,” said Elizabeth Andersen of the American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative. “Unfortunately, I do not think that alone can solve the problem.” She said televising court proceedings makes them highly transparent and is a deterrent to corruption. “The most recent dramatic example we saw of that was in Ukraine, with televised proceedings in the election fraud cases last fall, which did enormous good in terms of bringing greater transparency to those proceedings and building public confidence in that process.” Mr Nussbaumer added that if judges knew their countries’ laws more thoroughly, it would be “difficult for them to render decisions that are not based on law. In that sense judicial training can assist in the fight against corruption.” He also reminded the audience that the EBRD has recently launched two projects to increase judicial capacity in the commercial law sector in the Kyrgyz Republic and Georgia. Written by EBRD Senior Writer Kate Dunn
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23 May 2005 |
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