Outgoing Justice Minister presents draft of justice reform

The government is facing the second personal change in less than two months. Defence Minister Tvrdik resigned in June over cuts in defence spending, and Justice Minister Pavel Rychetsky is exchanging his ministerial seat for a judge's robe. Pavel Rychetsky's nomination for the post of a Constitutional Court judge has been approved by the Senate and Mr Rychetsky plans to hand in his resignation on Monday. Before leaving office, the outgoing Justice Minister presented his proposal of a comprehensive reform of the Czech justice system.

Outgoing Justice Minister presents draft of justice reform

Justice Minister Pavel Rychetsky, photo: CTK

Pavel Rychetsky is giving up his seat in the Senate and his post of Justice Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to move to the Moravian capital of Brno, the seat of the Czech Republic's Constitutional Court and serve a ten-year mandate of a Constitutional Court judge. His reform proposal includes a change of the internal structure of courts including a rise in salaries of court employees. Mr Rychetsky would also like to see the judges' salaries differentiated according to the gravity and complexity of cases they arbitrate. He would like to see more specialisation among judges who should also bear more responsibility for their work. The proposed reform raises the age of new judges to forty and opens the profession to experienced lawyers from all fields. Another change, Mr Rychetsky says, involves a change in the constitution.

"It is a change from a four-level to a three-level justice system. All cases should start at district courts and the first court of appeal would be a regional court. Eventually they would proceed to the Supreme Court. It means that we would have to close down the two High Courts in Prague and Olomouc, which are superfluous in the system and special agenda has to be found for the regional courts in order for the High Courts to have some second-level agenda."

Although the Czech Republic has almost 3,000 judges, the largest number in Europe in relation to the size of the population, there are still around 70,000 court cases which have been dragging on for more than three years. Only last week the Czech Republic was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to pay a fine of 10,000 euros to a family whose case Czech courts have been unable to solve for more than ten years.

"One of the most frequent causes of the excessive length of court cases is the fact that files circulate between different levels of courts. Second-level courts often look for formal and not factual faults in the proceedings. Then they annul the verdict, return the case back to the lower court where the case has to start from scratch again. The percentage of returned cases is around 50 percent in this country. In neighbouring Germany, it is between 3-5 percent."

Mr Rychetsky identified this practice as the main cause behind excessively lengthy proceedings. According to his reform proposal, deadlines should be introduced and higher-level courts should not return cases back to the lower courts but rather solve them themselves.

Of course, it will now be up to Mr Rychetsky's successor, whose name is to be disclosed on Tuesday, whether he or she will accept and push through his reform ideas.