Publication details
Are Guardians Resilient Enough?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Judicial councils seem to have fallen from the limelight recently. While supranational bodies still recommend judicial councils as the best governance model to secure judicial independence and effective courts’ decision-making, slowly proliferating the model from Eastern Europe to Latin America and South West Africa, democratic decline and rise of populism exposed many of their week pressure points. Several empirical studies demonstrated that judicial councils are not able to meet the ambitious expectations vested in their establishment. While, once properly designed, they can help insulate judges and judicial governance from politics, they also suffer from corporativism and resistance to dynamic change. But what is even more troublesome, they seem to magnify problems in those transitioning countries, that previously struggled with culture of judicial independence. Yet, surprisingly, in despite of relatively many empirical studies, no research so far mapped design failures and shortcomings of judicial councils in a systemic way. While judicial resilience became the buzzword of the 2023, little attention has been paid to resilience of those bodies that were meant to increase or stabilise judicial independence. In this paper, we offer a global comparative study of major problems that hamper the workings of judicial councils. We uncover the topical instances of JC’s failures to fulfil their mandates, from the lack of effectiveness, deadlocks of internal processes, to politicisation and capture by different branches of power. Based on these, we offer a valuable insight in what role judicial councils and their failures played in decay of judiciaries and what design failures can be potentially prevented in future. |
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