CONFERENCE ON THE STATE OF THE BIH JUDICIARY: REFINEMENT OF THE DRAFT LAW ON THE HIGH JUDICIAL AND PROSECUTORIAL COUNCIL NECCESSARY

Sarajevo, July 13, 2023 – The majority of courts do not publish information about judgments and information about prosecution cases are usually far from the public eye, while half of the judicial institutions ignore the inquiries of the media and citizens, these are the results of the research on judicial transparency published during the conference “Judiciary in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Status and Perspectives” held today in Sarajevo.

The participants of the conference, organized by Transparency International in BiH (TI BiH) in cooperation with the Balkan Research Network of BiH (BIRN BiH) with the support of the EU, referred to the amendments to the Law on the HJPC by which the government seeks to weaken the mechanisms for ensuring the accountability of holders of judicial functions.

The changes, which the Council of Ministers included in the Law on Amendments to the Law on the HJPC, seek to weaken the originally proposed mechanisms for ensuring accountability and call into question the possibility of checking the assets of holders of judicial functions.

From the very beginning of the process of amedment, not all the recommendations of the Venice Commission and the EU were followed, especially in terms of the provisions on the conflict of interests of members of the HJPC and other holders of judicial functions, while TI BIH warned from the beginning that there was a lot of room for non-declaration of assets and abuse of the property controls system.

Therefore, one of the conclusions of the conference, with which all participants agreed, is to use the further procedure to refine and improve the draft law.

If that opportunity is missed now, the question is how long it will take to adopt a new law that adequately solves these identified problems, and the conference sent a message that it is necessary to act urgently so that we do not end up in a situation where, due to inadequate wording, the mechanisms intended to strengthen the responsibility of abuse serve precisely to avoid it.

The online platform “Judiciary Index” was also presented at the conference, containing data on the transparency of 74 courts and 20 prosecutor’s offices, showing the worrying level for the publicity of the work of the BH judiciary.

55% of courts do not publish information about the first-instance verdicts they pass, and 90% of them do not publish any information about criminal cases on their websites, which undoubtedly encourages a low level of public trust in the work of the judiciary.

The poor state of the judiciary in terms of public access to its work is illustrated by research showing that 54% of courts and prosecutor’s offices in Bosnia and Herzegovina violated the legal deadline for responding to a request for free access to information, while half of the judicial institutions ignored media inquiries about the status of the case.

The worst results in transparency are recorded by the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Office in Sarajevo and the Herzegovina Neretva Canton, whose transparency index is 35, and the Municipal Courts in Žepče (28), Mostar (24) and Čitluk (23) and the Basic Court in Srebrenica with a score of 26. On the other hand, the Basic Court Teslić records the highest level of transparency with an index of 82, while among the most transparent institutions are the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina with an index of 81 and the Prosecutor’s Office of the Brčko District of BiH, which, like the Cantonal Prosecutor’s Offices of the SBK and Posavina Cantons, record a score of 75.

The “Judiciary Index” platform was created as part of the project “Strengthening networks of civil society organizations in order to improve accountability – SANCUS” with the financial support of the European Union. It evaluates the availability of information on the websites of institutions as well as the openness towards citizens, media and civil society organizations regarding the availability of information.

The platform also offers information on cases of corruption and organized crime, disciplinary proceedings, as well as other information on the work of the judiciary in BiH and allows citizens to create their own request for access to information that they can send to any judicial institution on the territory of BiH.

Press rls_13.07.23