Publication details
Shield or a Target? The Journey of Judicial Councils' Resilience
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Prior to the EU enlargement in 2000s, the establishment of a judicial council was commonly proposed by various European bodies’ recommendations as a somewhat uniform recipe to ensure the protection of the judiciary from arbitrary political interference. Thus, following the various attacks against judicial councils in the last two decades, several authors began to develop an idea that judicial independence safeguards may not be alone sufficient. A concept of resilience was introduced, prompting discussions on additional institutional measures that would make judicial councils more resilient to attacks from the outside (by political interferences) as well as from the within (by judicial oligarchs). However, looking back to the fundamentals, little attention has been paid to the question of how the recommendations of the European bodies have affected this resilience. The paper therefore creates a comprehensive model of the principles governing the judicial council, as suggested by several European bodies. These are subsequently confronted with the empirical experience achieved within the field of judicial self-governance. In the case study of countries which institutionalised judicial councils with regard to the EU enlargement policy, the author critically analyses how the implemented recommendations affected the level of resilience of judicial councils and compares it to the countries which decided to follow a different path of judicial self-government arrangement. Secondly, the case study aims to determine how the targeted recommendations managed to consider the specific conditions of individual countries. Inevitably, the analysis seeks to bring more light into who should be the driver of domestic judicial reforms. |
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