The majority of courts do not publish information about judgments, information about prosecution cases is mostly far from the public eye, while half of the judicial institutions ignore media and citizen inquiries – these are the results of the judicial transparency research published during the conference “Judiciary in BiH – Status and Perspectives”, which was held today in Sarajevo.
The participants of the conference, which was organized by Transparency International in BiH (TIBiH) in cooperation with the Balkan Research Network of BiH (BIRNBiH) 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, it was announced from TIBiH.
As stated, the amendments, which the Council of Ministers of BiH included in the Law on Amendments to the Law on the HJPC of BiH, seek to weaken the originally proposed mechanisms for ensuring accountability and call into question the possibility of checking the property of holders of judicial functions.
“From the very beginning of the process of amending the law, 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 but also of other holders of judicial functions, while TIBiH warned from the beginning that there is a lot of room for non-declaration of assets and abuse of the system. property control,” t is stated in the announcement.
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 a message was sent from the conference that it is necessary to act urgently so that we do not end up in a situation where, due to inadequate wording, the mechanisms provided for strengthening the responsibility of abuse precisely for its avoidance,” it is emphasized in the announcement.
The online platform “Judiciary Index” was also presented at the conference, which contains data on the (lack of) transparency of 74 courts and 20 prosecutor’s offices, showing the worrying level of publicity of the work of the BH judiciary.
As stated in the announcement, 55 percent of courts do not publish information about the first-instance judgments they pass, and 90 percent of them do not publish any information about criminal cases on their websites, which undoubtedly undermines the low level of public trust in the work of the judiciary.
“The bad state of the judiciary in terms of publicity in work is illustrated by the findings that 54 percent 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 even half of the judicial institutions ignored media inquiries about the status of the case they are dealing with,” it is stated.
According to the available data, 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 Žepč (28), Mostar (24) and Čitluk (23) and the Basic Court in Srebrenica with a score of 26.
On the other hand, the Basic Court in 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 Brčko District of BiH, which, like the cantonal prosecutor’s offices of Central Bosnia Canton and Posavina Canton, 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 requests for access to information that they can send to any judicial institution on the territory of BiH.
