On July 25, the newly-formed Council for the Selection of Judges started interviewing the candidates to the vacant positions of judges of the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Chamber. Almost 130 applicants are competing for 35 vacant posts in the Supreme Court and 11 in the Constitutional Chamber. The names of the selected candidates will be finalized by August 5 and sent to the President, who will in her turn submit the list of candidates to the parliament for approval.
The replacement of the entire pool of the Supreme Court judges is being conducted within the framework of broader reforms of the entire legal system in Kyrgyzstan. During the reign of the previous regimes, reform of the judicial branch was one of the most voiced and long-lasting demands of not only opposition forces but also the wider public as the judiciary system discredited itself and turned into the most corrupt state institution throughout the years since Kyrgyzstan’s independence. After last year’s government change, judicial reform became one of the focal points of the Constitutional reforms. As a result, fundamental changes in the legal system were introduced, including the elimination of the separate Constitutional court and deputing its powers to the newly-created Constitutional chamber under the Supreme Court. These changes were reflected in the new Constitution which was approved at a nationwide referendum in 2010.
Regarding the selection of judges, the Constitution foresees the formation of a Council for the Selection of Judges consisting of 24 members offered by the parliamentary majority, the parliamentary opposition and the Council of Judges, each group providing one third of the council’s members. Within its three-year term, the selecting council is responsible for choosing candidates for all vacant judge posts in the country.
With a declared aim to get rid of corrupt judges and create an independent and professional judicial system, the parliament announced all judge posts in the country vacant. “Currently, around 450 judges work across the country, all these posts may now be considered vacant” stated Sadyr Japarov, the head of the parliamentary committee on judicial and legal affairs, at the first meeting of the selecting council.
On August 15, despite the parliament’s summer vacation, its members will gather for an extraordinary session to approve the candidacies for the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Chamber. Afterwards, open competition for judge posts in all local courts is to be announced. We expect that a full replacement of the entire pool of judges in Kyrgyzstan will be finished by the end of October, Japarov concluded.
Meanwhile, the parliament’s judicial system reform initiative was highly supported and praised by the country’s leadership including Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbaeva. “From now on neither the President nor the legislative and executive branches possess mechanisms to put pressure on the judges’ work”, President Otunbaeva stated during her meeting with the council members. She noted that the process of restoring public trust in the judicial branch has started and now the council’s main task is to ensure transparency in selecting new judges.
However, despite the purported openness and independence of the council’s work, civil society representatives contend that the purpose of the reforms is undermined due to the lack of transparency and impartiality in the process of selecting judges. Aziza Abdrasulova, a member of the civil society council for judicial system control, stated that two members of the selecting council are running for judge posts in the Supreme Court. This creates a conflict of interests, Abdrasulova said.
In addition, civil society expressed heavy criticism toward the process of the council’s formation. As members of civil society council explained, the Constitution provides that the candidates for the council from the parliamentary majority and the opposition must come from civil society. However, parliamentary factions rather elected their trusted representatives, thus undermining the idea of creating a truly independent judicial branch, they claimed. Nurbek Toktakunov, head of the “Precedent” Legal Institute, noted that “parliamentary factions are making everything possible and impossible to form a judicial system which will be under the control of politicians.”
Similar concerns were voiced in the opinion of the European Commission for Democracy through Law, the so called Venice Commission. The main recommendations of the commission derived from a review of the draft law on the council, and aimed at reducing the risks of political influence and excluding party affiliation of the council members.
Local experts claim that the whole idea of a judicial system reform is becoming a subject of political manipulation and a continuing power struggle between different political forces. Such a situation will, of course, contribute to the rise of public skepticism and distrust in the council’s work and the judicial reform as a whole, which in the end could possibly lead to a failure of these reforms, experts concluded.