CEELI Concludes Judicial Roundtable
Source: http://ceeliinstitute.org/
Yesterday marked the end of the Central and Eastern European Judicial Exchange Network Roundtable, which took place June 16 and 17 at the Villa Gröbovka. The morning session tasked the participants with discussing “Balancing Independence with Accountability to Civil Society.” Preceding the discussion, Ms. Bilyana Wegertseder, Director at the Bulgarian Institute for Legal Initiatives, gave a fascinating presentation on the database her organization has put together profiling Bulgarian judges and prosecutors.
Ms. Wegertseder gave a virtual walk-through of the database, discussing the benefits and difficulties of trying to gather public information from potentially difficult sources and giving the public accurate pictures of the people the organization profiles. This presentation led to an involved debate on how much information the public should have about the private lives of judges and how to balance judge privacy and security with accountability and transparency.
After the coffee break, Judge Bohdan Poshva, of the Trial Chamber of Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court in Ukraine, presented on the legislative difficulties the judiciary faces in his country and outlined the reforms he would like to see effected to change the judicial structure. The discussion following this presentation focused then on the structures of Central and Eastern European judiciaries and the role of the European Court of Human Rights for individual judges.
The group then broke for lunch and was welcomed back after the break with a lecture by Dr. Levente Simon, from the National Judicial Council of Hungary. Dr. Simon gave a focused, informative lecture on his country’s experiences with developing an official code of ethics for judges and prosecutors. The conversation expanded beyond questions of how to develop a code of ethics (a particularly interesting topic because of the difference in cultural expectations citizens around the region have) to a discussion of which countries an official code of ethics is desirable for. This topic of building judicial integrity became the final talking point of the day. Judges Tunheim and Westhoff alongside CEELI Institute Executive Director Christopher Lehmann congratulated the participants, handing each one a certificate for completing the intensive two-day conference.