The High Judicial Council rejected in today’s meeting the request of the High Inspector of Justice for disciplinary proceedings with the measure “Public reprimand” against magistrate A.P., who is a judge at the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana, for failure to respect the reasonable deadline for issuing the reasoned decision.
HIJ has launched an investigation on its own initiative against the judge, based on the findings of the HIJ’s thematic inspection report, “On the procedure for announcing and reasoning judicial decisions of the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana (Civil Chamber) and the Administrative Court of First Instance of Tirana”, for the final decisions issued by these courts for the period 01.09.2022 – 30.12.2022. After a case-by-case analysis, this inspection resulted in the fact that in the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana, 89% of the decisions were issued within the deadline of 120 days. This deadline was assessed as the reasonable time needed by the judge/court to submit the final reasoned decision, as only this deadline can make the difference and serve as a reasonable time in the concrete situation of the workload, the structure and number of magistrates, or the typology of cases reviewed, considering the need for the reasoning and issuance of all judicial decisions according to the deadline provided for in Article 308 of the Code of Civil Procedure and also the current resources/capacities of the Court of First Instance of General Jurisdiction of Tirana to respect this deadline.
The inspection was followed by the start of verifications for judges of the First Instance Court of General Jurisdiction of Tirana, for decisions announced and issued with reasons to the secretariat after 120 days from the announcement.
The disciplinary investigation against Judge A.P. for failure to comply with the reasonable deadline for issuing the reasoned decision, included 21 decisions which were issued late. Related to of the delay of 2 years and 4 months, the HIJ has requested proceedings, while for the other delays, the HIJ has closed the investigation and sent the materials to the HJC for professional assessment of the magistrate.
The investigation found that the magistrate committed a disciplinary violation with carelessness in the form of negligence; the delays recorded for a long time in the reasoning of three judicial decisions; delays in the reasoning of judicial decisions are not justified by reasonable personal, health, or family matters, despite the fact that they are directly related to the magistrate. As a result of the judge’s inaction, the prestige of the judge’s image has been damaged, as well as the public’s trust in justice, even in the conditions when the magistrate has over 19 years of experience in office as a judge, which is an indicator of her very good knowledge regarding the role of exercising the duties with ethics and discipline of a magistrate.
During the investigation, the High Inspector of Justice considered as mitigating circumstances the fact that the magistrate had not had any other disciplinary measure and the cooperative behavior during the disciplinary investigation, concluding that the actions/inactions of Judge A.P. constitute a “Minor Violation” of discipline and proposing to the High Council of Justice the disciplinary measure “Public reprimand” for Judge A.P., provided for by Article 105, point 1, letter “b”, section “i” and Article 107 of Law No. 96/2016 “On Status”, as amended.
In today’s session, the High Judicial Council decided to reject the request of the High Inspector of Justice.
