BRATISLAVA, September 16, (WEBNOVINY) — The political fairness watchdog, the Fair-Play Alliance, has submitted a proposal to the Justice Ministry demanding the minister to open disciplinary proceedings against top Supreme Court figures. It believes that many files were assigned to senates and concrete judges of the Supreme Court at odds with the law. The organization says that Supreme Court President Stefan Harabin and his deputy Daniela Svecova committed disciplinary transgressions when they redistributed already assigned files directly to judges, thus circumventing the electronic filing room, which assigns files on a random basis. The Fair-Play Alliance says that as many as thirty files were distributed unlawfully. The Supreme Court argues that files were redistributed to balance the unjustly distributed workload of the senates and to resolve the situation after a judge retired and also in reaction to the absence of two judges in a the long run.
The alliance however says that „rule of law in our country is based on that nobody can influence to which concrete judge a file will be assigned.“ Therefore the law introduced the electronic filing room and nobody can avoid it, said Fair-Play Alliance’s Zuzana Wienk. She admitted that such step is possible only in exceptional cases and even in such cases it is possible to act exclusively in line with the work schedule at courts which is publicly available. If the random assignment of files via the electronic filing room is not observed, then plenty of people can turn to the Constitutional Court. If the Constitutional Court upholds their complaints, it might result in court procrastinations, as the cases will have to be reopen, warned the alliance. Wienk insists that the Justice Minister and the Office to Fight Corruption should examine the cases. According to her, the law enables the minister to submit a proposal for disciplinary proceedings. She believes that the described deeds are so serious that they can be qualified as a disciplinary transgression and therefore the justice minister should move to act and file such proposal.
Wienk mentioned in association with the initiative the case when the composition of one of the Supreme Court’s senates was changed in gradual steps. She specified that the senate in question will decide no the appellate review in the Tipos case. She added that there exists a suspicion that the changes might have been motivated by efforts to influence concrete court proceedings. The national lottery company Tipos is waiting for the verdict of the Supreme Court in the appellate review of its legal dispute with the company Sportka that has been dragging on since the split of the Czechoslovak Federation. Tipos might have pay tens of millions of euros if it loses the legal dispute with Sportka for alleged unauthorized use of Sportka’s know-how.
SITA