There is no selection of judges because the Judicial Council has no place to test the candidates

Photo: MIA

At the moment, the Council cannot choose eight judges for the Appeal in Skopje, it cannot choose the president of the court in Kumanovo, and it cannot appoint the 30 graduates from the Academy of Judges and Prosecutors as judges, because there is no place to test them. , so he asks for legal amendments to "soften" the conditions for who can conduct psychological and integrity tests

There is a shortage of judges in the courts throughout Macedonia, and the judicial positions are not being filled because it is not possible to fulfill the legal obligation that the judges have passed a psychological test and an integrity test, because there is no accredited institution in the country that conducts such internationally recognized tests, he informed today. at a briefing with the media, the president of the Judicial Council Sashko Georgievski. Currently, the Council cannot choose eight judges for the Appeal in Skopje, cannot choose the president of the court in Kumanovo, as well as appoint 30 graduated academicians from the Academy of Judges and Prosecutors as judges, because there is no place to test them.

From 2015 until 2022, the Judicial Council signed contracts with the Institute for Sociological and Political-Legal Research to conduct psychological and integrity tests of candidates for judges, heads of courts, etc. Last year in December, the then president Vesna Dameva prepared a new annex that would extend the contract with the Institute, but that annex remained unsigned and since then, for six months now, the Judicial Council has had nowhere to send the candidates for testing. Georgievski said that he does not know why his predecessor Dameva did not sign the annex with the Institute, but she sent letters to the Government in January, February and March requesting to allow the Judicial Council to sign an agreement with an independent and accredited institution that uses internationally accredited psychological tests and tests for integrity, as required by the Law on the Judicial Council, and the Accreditation Agency received a response that there is no such accredited institution in Macedonia.

Given that the Institute for Sociological and Political-Legal Research conducted tests of candidates for judges from 2015 to 2022, the question arose whether if the tests from this Institute were not accredited all the time, the tests from this Institute are disputed from the point of view of the law, so the elections of the judges of the past years, from the Judicial Council, said that they are not competent to determine whether the previous tests are valid, but for them it is a fact that now at the moment there is no one to conclude an agreement with for the tests, and the tests must be performed legally.

According to the Law on the Judicial Council, the integrity test is based on the existing ethical and professional codes for performing the function of a judge and aims to check the ethical and moral values ​​of the candidate, and for the implementation of the tests the Judicial Council hires experts from an independent and fully accredited professional institution. The bill also states that the psychological test is conducted on the basis of internationally recognized psychological tests, which are applied in at least one of the member states of the European Union and the OECD.

- Courts are short of judges, and new ones cannot be appointed for these reasons. It is easiest to enter into a new contract with someone who will do the testing, but we do not have a legal counterparty. This is a checkmate position for us. It is not a matter of a technical obstacle, but a legal obstacle - said Georgevski.

The solution is either to change the Law of the Judicial Council in the section with the conditions for the company that will perform the testing or by "bridging", i.e. the completed academics should use the tests that have already been carried out when taking the exams, the results of which are still valid for them, because they were issued to them valid for four years.

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