The President of the Constitutional Court, Vladan Petrov, stated that “the sanction for those judges who have violated the ban on political activity and who publicly declare themselves opponents of the current authorities—many of whom, as if with its help, have advanced in their positions—is dismissal.”
“This is a conflict of interest that must and can be sanctioned by the loss of judicial office. The only problem is that ‘a crow does not peck out another crow’s eyes.’ Complementary to the principle of non-punishment is the habit of public non-confrontation,” Petrov said in an interview for today’s edition of the daily Politika.
He added that “the High Judicial Council, composed of ‘pre-amendment’ judges and ‘post-amendment’ prominent legal experts, has not become a sufficiently compact body with broader social authority to muster the strength to impose an individual sanction on a judge-politician.”
“Nothing would be gained by returning to the old system, to the Assembly. There, questions of judicial status would become a subject of political bargaining. The judiciary must be protected from such politics, but also wrested away from the Constitution and the state,” Petrov said.
He also noted that there is a “phenomenon of ‘organic’ ties between a significant number of judges and non-governmental organizations of dubious funding sources and anti-state political activity.”
“Certain members of those organizations, such as CEPRIS, invoke some kind of inviolability of the judicial function, but it is precisely they who trivialize it through their openly political activity,” Petrov assessed.
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Source: N1 Foto: Ata images