Madam, – I would concur with John Stafford (December 18th), in that the spirit of the law would dictate that the constitutional prohibition on reducing the pay of judges would not apply if proposed salary cuts were applied across the board to all public servants.
However, a constitutional referendum would be needed in order to allow the invoking of defined pay cuts as the letter of the law would, in contrast, clearly be broken in this case. A different scenario should pertain to the application of the public service pension levy introduced last year, however.
The letter of the law would not be broken if the levy was applied also to the judiciary, given that the term “remuneration” in the Constitution should be regarded as meaning “remuneration before deductions”, unless otherwise qualified. This is already illustrated in practice by the fact that judges suffer financially whenever income tax is increased. – Yours, etc,