Slovenian Government determined to turn the Constitutional Court into their private political tool
petek, 25. 11. 2016It all started almost a year ago, with a Facebook post of a high ranking governing party’s MP Jasna Murgel, which read: “One year will pass in a blink of an eye. In the mean time, we’ll replace the judges of the Constitutional Court.” This scandalous statement was made in the moments after it became clear that Slovenian voters overwhelmingly rejected the deletion of gender from the law on family relations in a referendum held last December. She poured her anger, over the choice voters made in a democratic process, on to the Constitutional Court which ruled in favour of staging the referendum in the first place. The “One year” part of her comment refers to the time period required to pass, before proposing a new law on the same matter that was rejected in the referendum.
The governing party’s promise to make a series of political appointments to the Constitutional Court looks to be one of the few promises Miro Cerar’s Government actually intends to keep. Since then, Cerar’s Government already replaced two of the Constitutional Court judges. In the spring, another four will follow, which makes the total of six “government judges” out of nine that occupy Slovenia’s top court. With that, the governing elite will have cemented the Constitutional Court with two-thirds majority for the next nine years – which is the length of a term. Six judges – vetted and verified by the government – out of nine will therefore essentially be loyal to the ideological beliefs of the current government. In practice, the left-wing agenda will have no problem of passing through the top Slovenian court for at least the next nine years.
The Government will have to face at least one hurdle before achieving a comfortable majority in the Constitutional Court. They will have especially hard time explaining the possible rejection of the most qualified candidate for the judge at the Constitutional Court – Harvard-based academic, DDr. Klemen Jaklič, former full member of the Venice Commission and author of Constitutional Pluralism in the EU (Oxford University Press 2014), who holds two PhDs in law (in European integration and human rights) from Harvard and Oxford Universities and has been teaching at Harvard for years in the fields of human rights, constitutional theory, international justice, European integration, etc. He was voted several times as the most eminent member of the Slovenian legal profession, but that didn’t stop Cerar from eliminating him from the list of candidates for the European Court of Human Rights. He was by far the strongest candidate.