Independent Justice ...?

The past couple of weeks were a constant and intense involvement with the Judiciary; from attending disciplinary court sessions, conferences, discussion forums, or individual interactions with judges. The complexity of problems in which the Slovak judges find themselves is immense and trying to find a way to make even a smallest possible dent in the whole matter is a true quest.

First of all, when attending the said activities, one cannot help but to sense a slight discord - or let's say different set of wave-lengths that involved parties communicate with - causing perhaps exactly the very obstacle to a more efficient way forth. When taken the internal Slovak situation into account, one could - albeit to a limited extent - still understand; when coming from external sources, who wish to express matters in a fairly diplomatic way or, probably, to rather highlight the positive trends than to criticise, then it tends to be taken out of context and becoming prone to serious misinterpretation.

Last Thursday, while attending a discussion forum on "Judicial Integrity and Ethics", I was glad to that one of the panelists was a prominent US judge - giving examples from his own working experience. Whereas a few weeks earlier, newspaper articles seriously disfigured a statement on the independence of Slovak judges: Good sign as the Slovak Judiciary is better off with regard to the said independence than in most other states. Wow... but better off in what sense?

The mere fact, that certain laws perhaps do stipulate an independence (to whichever degree possible), perhaps the mere fact that control mechanisms are lacking - or the fact that the Judiciary is subjected to the quirks of one single person (NB - politically appointed!), and visibly controlled and thus heavily influenced - where one hardly does not need rocket-science to demonstrate for what reason - I would not dare to put into my mouth the aforementioned conclusion. If the formalistic setting invites for abuse, then the setting cannot be labelled as being sound, or 'better than other states'.

The second deficit is the awareness; in the first place among the majority of judges (and may I state, that there are enough individual judges in Slovakia, who dare(d) to speak about the state of the judiciary - with the result of being punished, stripped of their function) and furthermore the public as well. And as I have repeatedly pointed out in earlier articles, the media - in my eyes - plays relatively an insufficient role in this; articles are incomplete, distorted - leading unnecessarily to a misunderstanding by a large group of readers.

All involved parties must fully understand their active roles and responsibilities in the whole process; breaking through many barriers is never an easy task - thus a constant and a maximum exposure is perhaps the only possible starting point. But the starting point needs to be with a joint effort - fragmented and uncoordinated actions could in the end result in a complete misunderstanding and reinforcing prejudices instead of consolidating a mind-set. If only Brussels would finally realise, what importance this issue has.