The non-governmental organization (NGO) Center for Civil Liberties (CEGAS) announced today that the Judicial Council is not interested in the systematic regulation of the field of court experts.
They said that through numerous monitoring and analysis of work in the field of court experts, they came to many shortcomings and vagueness, both in the normative and in the essential sense.
"If we take into account the number of over 700 court experts in Montenegro, whose list is regularly updated by the Ministry of Justice, the question arises - how is the control of their selection and work conducted, if according to the analysis of the World Bank, the opinion of 52,9 percent of judges and 69,5, 2017 percent of prosecutors that the lack of qualified experts in certain areas negatively affects the quality and efficiency of trials? expert, can speak sufficiently about the control role of the Expert Commission, which according to the Law on Court Experts consists of one member from the ranks of judges, one member from the ranks of state prosecutors, two members from the ranks of court experts and one member from the state administration body responsible for judicial affairs" , it is emphasized in the announcement.
CEGAS added that they noticed that there are different ways of monitoring payment, engagement, and then the way of selecting court experts, both from the judiciary and from the prosecution in the Montenegrin judiciary.
"If out of the total number of court experts, who are on the updated list of court experts of the Ministry of Justice, we have engaged only 34,7% in 2023, it is unclear what will happen to those 65,3%. With the cooperation with the Association of Court Experts, we noticed that one of the potential ambiguities and problems is that court experts, as they are not under the legal obligation to belong to the Association of Court Experts, do not have a large number of members in this Association, so only 25,4% of the Association's members belong to them out of the total number of court experts in Montenegro," the announcement reads.
CEGAS stated that their involvement in the field of forensic experts, in addition to cooperation with the Association of forensic experts, the Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor's Council, was met with the response of the Judicial Council that it is not competent for issues related to the work of forensic experts since 2016. when the Law on Court Experts entered into force, regardless of the fact that one member of the Commission for Experts is delegated through the General Session of the Supreme Court.
"Although one of the members of the Commission for Experts is a judge appointed on the proposal of the General Session of the Supreme Court of Montenegro, and its president is appointed from among judges or state prosecutors, while the dismissal procedure is actually filed by the president of the court, the head of the state prosecution, the head of another body leading the proceedings, the judge and the state prosecutor in whose case the expert acted, is a vague reference to incompetence on the part of the Judicial Council for the way the entire field of court experts functions," the statement reads.
CEGAS believes that this issue can only be properly resolved through the joint efforts of all actors of the judiciary, as well as the Minister of Justice and the Association of Court Experts, along with the interested civil sector and the public.
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