The High Council of Justice summarized its practice in cases on judges’ and prosecutors’ disciplinary liability, which makes judges and complainants more informed regarding the Council’s approaches to considering disciplinary complaints.
In 2023, the new composition of the HCJ first approved The Summary of HCJ’s Practice in Considering Complaints against Decisions in Disciplinary Proceedings Regarding Prosecutors, and then it also issued a similar document, The Summary of HCJ’s Practice in Considering Disciplinary Complaints against Judges.
As a rule, the HCJ’s practice draws much less attention from the legal community than the case law of high judicial instances, so both the complainants and the judges are often not sufficiently aware of the HCJ’s approaches to resolving certain issues of judges’ and prosecutors’ disciplinary liability. Therefore, such analytical work by the HCJ is truly commendable, since these summaries give both judges and complainants a chance to have a deeper understanding of the HCJ’s practice, which will help the former to prepare their defense in disciplinary cases better, and the latter — to write disciplinary complaints of better quality.
It should be noted, however, that there is room for improvement in these summaries. Firstly, they are quite large. Second, the authors of the summaries occasionally criticize certain legal positions of the Council itself. Since the summaries were approved by the Council itself, the question arises whether the criticism belongs solely to the authors or to the HCJ itself, and whether its members are intending to do something with the legal positions in the HCJ’s practice that they criticized by approving the summaries.
These steps taken by the rebooted High Council of Justice are indeed quite positive and significant. But do they outweigh the negative decisions and evident failures?
