Judiciary

Supreme Court justices will be required to disclose more of their activities, including some free trips, air travel and other types of gifts, according to rules adopted earlier this month.

Under the new rules, justices and other federal judges must report travel by private jet, as well as stays at commercial properties, such as hotels, resorts or hunting lodges.

"We have no other purpose than to fight crime and we have no other enemy. The balance is called the rule of law. The Bulgarian judiciary cannot ask politicians for permission to work.

Whether or not political parties in Montenegro can bury their differences to form a new government, they will have to find a way to agree on the judiciary or risk complete paralysis.

Bled – A two-day Conference of Chief Justices of Central and Eastern Europe, which focussed on the independence of judiciary at the institutional level and the level of judges, concludes in Bled on Tuesday. Supreme Court president Damijan Florjančič said new situations challenging this were emerging all the time.

Justice Minister Konstantinos Tsiaras expressed satisfaction over the reopening of Athens courts on Tuesday and the "successful" resumption of judicial proceedings.

In a bid to clear the backlog that has accumulated due to the shutdown of the country's court system and in anticipation of the easing of the lockdown next month, the government has drafted legislation for a mass write-off of cases that are considered less serious crimes and for which the law provides for sentences of up to one year in prison. 

Judges and prosecutors have to display poise and wisdom when posting online, because their opinions influence society's perception of the judiciary, reads one of the conclusions of a conference to release good practice guidance for magistrates using social media or online platforms.

A crucial day for the election of a new Attorney General. The Supreme Judicial Council will hear the only candidate for the post - the current deputy of Sotir Tsatsarov - Ivan Geshev.

The new government is clearly gunning for the notoriously corrupt court system in Moldova - but change may prove hard to achieve while the old corpus of judges remains in place, experts warn.

About the recent tragic event in Caracal, where a hitch-hiking teenage girl was reportedly kidnapped, raped and murdered as the authorities took a long time to act on her emergency calls, the Prosecutors' Section of the Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM) on Monday said that "the legal truth and responsibilities should be proven and established on the basis of evidence and in no way under the