No judge or any judicial body is an exception,” stressed President of Latvia Raimonds Vējonis when addressing the audience of the conference dedicated to the centenary of the Latvian judicial system on Friday, 7 September 2018.
The President of Latvia drew the attention of the audience to the judges of the first instance court, which form the basis of the entire judicial system. Judicial reforms were carried out with the aim of allowing the district or city court to examine and fairly resolve each case. “Therefore, it is particularly important that a judge of the first instance court does everything professionally so that we can say that the process has been fair and the outcome is fair. If we will not be demanding today and we will accept that any judge of the first instance court cannot deal with some cases, then we should ask whether we are not facing new challenges?” noted Raimonds Vējonis.
At the same time, the President of Latvia invited the Legal Standing Committee of the Saeima and the Ministry of Justice to improve the regulation of the disciplinary liability and qualification assessment of judges further. “The limitation periods for disciplinary proceedings against judges should be longer because we often find out about the perpetrators of violations later than the two years stipulated by law. Provision should be made for an extraordinary assessment of the qualifications of judges outside the disciplinary proceedings as well if there are important reasons for that. We also need to assess how to make the assessment of qualifications of judges and mechanisms for disciplinary liability more efficient and effective,” stated Raimonds Vējonis.
The President of Latvia called on each judge to work in such a way that the three words would describe judicial systems of Latvia unambiguously: justice, integrity, and excellence, and he stressed that we should not stop at the achievements and offer a mediocre judicial system to the population in Latvia.