On Friday, 25 April, Human Rights Action (HRA) submitted a letter to the president of the Constitutional Court, Ms. Desanka Lopičić, urging the Constitutional Court to urgently decide on our initiative for the constitutional review of the Parliamentary Rules of Procedure “addition” of the third round of voting for the Supreme State Prosecutor (SSP) in contravention with the reformed Constitution. HRA also appealed to the Constitutional Court to publish the schedule of deciding on cases, as well as to open the court sessions to the public in order to improve the transparency of its operation and eliminate any doubts of political influence.

The Constitutional Court has not yet decided on HRA’s initiative of 28 March 2014, in which HRA requested the review of constitutionality of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, regarding the election of the Supreme State Prosecutor, since the third round of voting was added to the Rules of Procedure in form of “repeated second round”, contrary to the Constitution which explicitly prescribes two rounds of voting.

The Court also never decided on the HRA’s request to postpone the scheduled voting for the SSP until the final review of constitutionality of the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament is conducted. This resulted in the third round of voting for the SSP, which violated the Constitution. We concluded with regret that in this case the Constitutional Court did not protect the Constitution of Montenegro, and that the newly-elected composition of the Constitutional Court, by deciding to ignore the initiative, demonstrated unwillingness to effectively and responsibly perform its function.

Considering that a new round of competition for the SSP has been announced, we appeal to the Constitutional Court to timely decide on our initiative this time, and thus ensure that constitutionality of the election of the Supreme State Prosecutor is not brought into question.

HRA repeated the appeal from the letter submitted to the president of the Constitutional Court on 21 January, to improve public confidence in impartiality and independence of the Constitutional Court by making its operation more transparent.

A large number of old cases are still unresolved by the Constitutional Court, many of which have a wider social significance, and some of them are more than three years old. HRA has noticed that procedures for review of constitutionality of the Public Assembly Law and the Criminal Procedure Code have been initiated in the meantime. However, we believe that the public has the right to know which initiatives and requests for review of constitutionality have been submitted to the Constitutional Court to date, and when and according to which order of priority the Court will decide on them. Therefore, we propose that the Constitutional Court urgently publishes the schedule of the decision-making process on its website, both on the old cases and the newer ones which the Court intends to resolve as a priority. We also propose that the Court should publish in which cases it decided contrary to the scheduled order, “as a priority”, as well as written reasoning for this.

The transparency of Court’s operation should also be improved by publishing dates of scheduled sessions and a list of cases to be decided upon at each session, in order to allow all interested parties to attend the sessions. We propose to the President of the Court to publish invitations for sessions on Court’s website on the same day when they are sent to judges, which should not cause additional expense or workload for the Court.

We believe that increased transparency of Court’s operation would help to assure public that there is no political influence on the Court nor any political calculations in its operation, as this has been perception of the public regarding many decisions of the Court, or lack of promptness in adopting decisions.  

Letter on the initiative for the review of constitutionality no. U-II- 11/14 of 28 march 2014, the decision-making process and the transparency of operation of the Constitutional Court is available (in Montenegrin) here.