Despite HRA’s appeals from July and the fact that there are as many as 36 vacant judge positions in the basic courts in Montenegro, for almost five months now the Judicial Council has been keeping on hold 11 candidates for judges who have successfully completed training and could fill at least a third of the vacant positions.
The assignment of candidates seems to have been hampered by an omission the Judicial Council made a little more than two years ago. Namely, during the selection of the above mentioned 11 candidates for judges, it failed to draw lots to determine the order of candidates who received the same number of points, although the law obliged it to do so. Candidates have the right to choose the court in which they will be employed in accordance with their order in the ranking list. In this specific case, top four candidates, as well as the 7th and 8th ones, have an identical number of points.
To this day, the Judicial Council has not made it known whether and how it will resolve this omission.
According to the findings of the HRA, in the last few days some of the candidates received an email from the Judicial Council in which they were asked to name the court to which they would like to be assigned. From the content of the email, which HRA had access to, it does not appear that the Judicial Council has corrected its mistake and ranked the candidates by drawing lots. On the contrary, it can be concluded that the Council did not do anything about this and has rather decided to assign candidates based on the ranking list that was drawn up two years ago, despite the fact that some candidates challenged it.
The failure of the Judicial Council to correct the mistake, which they themselves admitted to a month and a half ago, calls into question the transparency and legality of the assignment of new judges.
We appeal on the Judicial Council to overcome this problem transparently and in an urgent fashion, and to assign the missing judges to the courts so that they can start working in the general interest as soon as possible.
