N8.T7 – Are Judges Abusing Readiness in Montenegrin Courts?
HRA NEWSLETTER 8 – TOPIC 7
Montenegrin judges charge a lot for being on standby and on call. According to the Judicial Council data published by the Centre for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro, almost EUR 730,000 were paid for these purposes just last year alone (EUR 530,000 for being on standby).
The research conducted by CIN-CG also showed that, in 2024, some judges had “more hours of standby time than the total number of hours that were available for such work in that month once the working hours were subtracted”.
For example, the President of the Basic Court in Plav, Mirjana Knežević, was on standby for 554 hours in September 2024, a month that had only 552 possible hours. The same was recorded in the courts in Rožaje and Cetinje.
However, the Judicial Council explained that those cases involved an “obviously technical errors made while writing numbers in preparing a large number of decisions that are made every month, and that these examples represent rare exceptions and not the rule”.
Data concerning the Appellate Court also show that judges were often on standby. Four or five judges were on standby for hundreds of hours every month, without a single on-call shift. The situation was similar in the Basic Court in Kotor, as well as in most other courts in the country.
It is interesting, however – according to the CIN-CG report – that at the end of last year, i.e. from the moment when Valentina Pavličić was elected new President of the Supreme Court of Montenegro, there has been a visible decrease in standby hours.
Therefore, a legitimate question arises: were judges abusing their rights?
“The answer to those questions should be provided by the judicial inspection of the Ministry of Justice, which is competent to carry out control of the application of the Court Rules of Procedure in the part that refers to court administration”, the Director of the Human Rights Action (HRA) Tea Gorjanc-Prelević told CIN-CG.
The court Rules of Procedure prescribe that “the president of the court assigns the judge for the investigation, as well as officials and state employees who will be ready to come to the court, and determines the standby status of other judges, officials and state employees who should perform tasks that do not tolerate delay”.
“Such a need, for standby to last non-stop, should be documented, extra hours should be recorded in the court, there should be a written record of everything, minutes of deliberations, etc., so that the judicial inspection can verify whether there was a basis for all those standbys”, concluded Gorjanc-Prelević.
Although monthly standby schedules are the responsibility of the court presidents, the Judicial Council pointed out to CIN-CG that they are actively working on the preparation of Guidelines for compiling standby schedules and records of work that exceeds full-time, whose adoption and publication is expected in the upcoming period.
High standby costs and identified irregularities in the number of judges’ hours indicate insufficient control and the possibility of abusing the system. Although the Judicial Council is working on new Guidelines for better standby monitoring and scheduling, it is necessary to urgently strengthen supervision in order to ensure accountability and transparency.
The Human Rights Action sent a letter to the Minister of Justice, asking whether the inspection has been initiated; however, the answer had not arrived by the time of publication of this issue of the Judicial Bulletin.
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