Abstract
In the Czech system of court administration, judicial councils have had their fixed place, at least in terms of time, as court bodies since the adoption of Act No. 6/2002 Coll., On Courts and Judges. As they are the only state bodies formed based on the direct election of judges, judicial councils represent a relatively unique body that deviates from the standard hierarchical structure of the judicial administration.
Unfortunately, this relative uniqueness does not fully correspond to the attention of the public, which does not pay much attention to the area of judicial administration, which is not any different regarding the regulation of judicial councils. For the purposes of this paper, I therefore determine the research question of whether this institute is used effectively in the courts and whether the outputs of the judicial councils give the presidents of the courts positive feedback.
This is measured in this paper by an analysis of the very appointment of judicial councils to the assembly of judges and the specific exercise of the powers of judicial councils. This is based on my own analysis, which I performed in the years 2017 - 2019 on materials provided by courts through requests for information under Act No. 106/1999 Coll., On Free Access to Information.
According to it, I come to the conclusion that both the appointment and the exercise of the powers of judicial councils cause practical problems, mainly due to the ambiguity of the law and the lax approach of the Ministry of Justice. All this is probably supported by the lack of interest on the part of courts and judges themselves in the systemically fruitful involvement of judicial councils in the administration of justice, which stems in part from the structurally inappropriate establishment of a judicial council in every court in the Czech Republic to which at least 11 judges are assigned.
The paper is divided into three parts. In the first I deal with the analysis of the legal regulation in the Czech Republic using a partial comparison of some partial institutes with the system in Germany.
In the second part, the paper deals with the analysis and analysis of the appointment of judicial councils and related procedures, where it draws primarily from the information captured in Annex 1. The third part works with an analysis of the specific exercise of judicial councils and judges' assembly. in Annex No. 2.
This is followed by conclusions with brief de lege ferenda considerations.