Press Release of the Court of BIH and Prosecutor’s Office of BIH regarding the statement made by the Justice Minister Bariša Čolak

Večernji list daily, the issue of 9 June 2014, page 8, published the interview in which the BIH Justice Minister Bariša Čolak  stated: „Prosecutor Salihović and Court President Kreso want judges and prosecutors to be outside the evaluation system which is not in conformity with impartial justice“, which is completely untrue.  

It is incorrect that heads of state-level judicial institutions oppose the evaluation system. On the contrary, we are striving for the evaluation to be grounded on law which is currently inexistent and it must be harmonized with the relevant international standards.  Those standards require that the evaluation is conducted within the expertise framework exclusively, rather than within the framework of executive, administrative or other bodies that do not belong to the judicial authority as it is proposed in these separate amendments to the Law on HJPC. The proposed amendments are exactly the path to introduction of political influence over certain judicial functions and political interference into the independent work of judiciary.

We have been actively involved in a three-year long Structured Dialogue process dealing with the problem of state-level judiciary functioning including the very important issue such as the evaluation of judicial office holders which is not adequately regulated under the law. It is known that a new text of the Law on HJPC is being prepared and therefore a selective approach and taking the issue of evaluation out of context of constructive dialogue is not good as it will distance us from the Structured Dialogue recommendations.

In order to properly inform the public, we underline that it is exactly the Ministry of Justice which was expected to undertake efficient measures in the past 10 years of state judiciary work in order to reach a necessary legal framework that would provide for single evaluation system for all judicial office-holders including not only court presidents and chief prosecutors but also judges and prosecutors at state-level judiciary, and that has never occurred. That is why it is concerning that the urgency is given to the procedure at this point regardless of the discussion held within the Structured Dialogue.  The Minister is expected to maintain the establishment of corrective evaluation mechanism which will be within the authority of judicial expertise and in accordance with the international principles and not in the authority of other bodies which would exactly provide for politicizing of the evaluation process of certain judicial office holders, as proposed in the amendments to the Law.