THE SYSTEM for appointing judges must be independent of government, fair, open and transparent, according to the representative body for judges in Europe.
Appointments should be made by a body totally independent of government, it said.
The principles that should apply to appointments are contained in the final Declaration of the General Assembly of the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ), which concluded its three-day meeting in Dublin on Friday. The ENCJ unites all Councils for the Judiciary of the EU member states and represents them in the EU.
The meeting was hosted by the Irish Interim Judicial Council and the Courts Service, and adopted the Dublin Declaration on the standards which need to be developed for the recruitment, appointment and promotion of judges. The assembly also elected High Court judge Mr Justice Paul Gilligan as its incoming president.
At the moment, judges in Ireland are nominated by governments from lists forwarded by the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board for appointment by the president of Ireland. This is a formality, as the president never rejects a government nominee.
The board clears applicants for appointments on their suitability. This mainly concerns basic criteria such as their length of experience as lawyers, and possession of a tax clearance certificate. It forwards a list of seven suitable candidates to the government, without any ranking as to suitability, and the government is not obliged to appoint from the list. This means the system is still essentially one of political appointments.
Some recent such appointments by the current Government have attracted controversy because of the links between the nominees and Government parties.
Last November, the Government appointed six judges, five of whom had links to Fine Gael or Labour. Mr Justice Michael White, promoted from the Circuit Court to the High Court, was a former Workers’ Party election candidate, and Mr Justice Kevin Cross was a son-in-law of former Fine Gael minister Patrick Lindsay and a donor to Lucinda Creighton’s election campaign.
Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said there was no reason to suggest the nominations were not based on merit, and said all those nominated were very well qualified.
It is also the case that under Fianna Fáil-PD coalitions many judicial appointees had links to one or other of those parties.
This long-standing system falls short of standards laid down in the ENCJ declaration, which said the selection of members of the judiciary ought to be in the hands of a body independent of government.
“There requires to be a clearly defined and published set of selection competencies against which candidates for judicial appointment should be assessed at all stages of the appointment process,” it said, adding that the entire process had to be open to public scrutiny since the public had the right to know how its judges were selected.
Mrs Justice Susan Denham said: “Its contents should be seen as a possible new standard for appointing judges and operating judicial councils across all of Europe’s democracies.”
Mr Shatter has said his department is reviewing the method of judicial appointments.