Irish judicial appointments ‘too political’
THE Council of Europe’s anticorruption monitoring body, GRECO, has reported that Ireland has failed over six years to implement five key recommendations regarding judges.
At a time when the Government is being questioned about the process by which Judge Séamus Woulfe was replaced as attorney general and given a job in the Supreme Court, GRECO has just published its second interim compliance report, following an initial study it carried out in 2014.
Bjorn Janson, deputy executive secretary of GRECO, said it had been concerned the appointment of judges in Ireland was not sufficiently transparent, and appeared to be ‘too political’.
He said the organisation welcomed the establishment of the Judicial Council, but noted that the Judicial Appointments Commission Bill had lapsed, and had not been passed by the Oireachtas.
GRECO had recommended that the current system for selection, recruitment, promotion and transfers of judges in Ireland be reviewed, to target the appointments to the most qualified and suitable candidates in a transparent way, without improper influence from the executive or political powers. GRECO also criticised the procedure of putting forward a non-prioritised list of at least seven candidates for the Government to decide upon.
Mr Janson told RTÉ Radio 1: ‘We welcomed the establishment of the Judicial Council in Ireland. This was a major achievement.’
He continued: ‘Another thing that remains is about the appointment of judges in Ireland.
‘When GRECO was in Ireland doing this assessment back in 2014, we assessed how the system worked and we found out that the Judicial Appointments Advisory Board, JAAB, was a good selecting body as such, but that it selected a large number of judges and just passed the list on to the Government for decision, which made the system look a bit political.’
He said the selection process should be thoroughly transparent, with JAAB ranking its list of candidates in order from first to last. ‘It would minimise political appointments in the system,’ he said.