Georgia’s outgoing Parliament went into its summer recess after concluding its spring sessions on Friday without adopting some of the major legislative proposals, among them package of bills known as the “third wave of the judicial reforms.”
If no emergency session is summoned, the Parliament is not expected to reconvene till early September, when it will hold few sessions before again suspending work as the legislative body in Georgia usually goes in recess one month before the parliamentary elections.
At a parliamentary bureau meeting on Friday MP Gia Volski, who chairs ruling party GDDG’s faction in the Parliament, asked not to put the package of judicial bills on vote, citing unspecified differences over number of issues.
Although the package, drafted by the Ministry of Justice and made up of 11 bills, has been passed with its first and second reading by the Parliament, its approval with the final reading has been delayed.
Among other issues, the package proposes introduction of electronic case assigning system that would provide for randomly assigning cases to judges, minimizing the role of court chairpersons in the process.
“We have failed to overcome differences on number of issues, and perhaps we should get back to it in September,” GDDG MP Volski said.
Parliament Speaker, Davit Usupashvili, responded by reminding his colleagues that the bill has already been passed by its first and second hearing and procedurally it is now impossible to substantially amend the bill before the final reading.
Usupashvili added that the failure to adopt the package would be “politically damaging for us as well as for the [judicial] system itself.”
The issue was also addressed at a meeting of U.S.-Georgia working group on democracy under the strategic partnership charter between the two countries, which was held in Tbilisi on June 21.
The U.S. delegation has called for adoption of this judicial bill.
“We… underscored the importance of an independent judiciary to any strong democracy and urged the passage of the third wave of the judicial reforms,” U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, Bridget Brink, said after the meeting.
The package was first initiated in July, 2015. Parliament adopted it with its first hearing seven months later in mid-February, 2016. It was passed with the second reading in late April. Parliamentary committees prepared it for the third reading by early May, but its progress has stalled since then.
GDDG lawmakers were reluctant on June 24 to discuss details of “differences”, which they have cited as a reason behind the decision to delay adoption of the package.
Deputy Justice Minister, Alexandre Baramidze, says that the package had no support of 76 MPs – required minimum for it to be passed, so it was not put on vote.
He told Civil.ge that differences were mostly about the rule of selecting and appointing chairpersons of courts (except of the Supreme Court).
“Some lawmakers are against the rule of appointment of court chairpersons. They say that they will not support the entire package, if their demands over this issue are not met,” Baramidze said, adding that these MPs want the current rule to be changed.
According to the existing legislation it is up to the High Council of Justice (HCoJ), the body overseeing judicial system, to appoint and dismiss chairpersons of courts (except of the Supreme Court).
The initial version of the “third-wave reform” package envisaged giving the right to judges themselves to elect chairpersons of courts.
But in the course of parliamentary decisions this provision was amended upon the initiative from GDDG MP Gedevan Popkhadze; according to the proposal judges of a respective court would have the right to name three candidates for their court’s chairmanship, but it would have been up to the HCoJ to pick from the proposed three candidates.
Later even this version was revised and currently the draft envisages keeping the existing rule unchanged, meaning that it will be again up to the HCoJ to appoint chairpersons of courts for a five-year term.
The package of bills also envisages introduction of detailed criteria for selecting and appointing judges by the HCoJ; the current judicial appointments by the HCoJ are much criticized by the local monitoring groups.
According to the package of bills, number of Supreme Court judges should be no less than 16; no fixed number of Supreme Court judges is currently set by the law and it is up to the Court itself to decide how many judges it should have.
After several months of delay, on June 10 the Parliament voted on nominations made by President Giorgi Margvelashvili for three vacant seats in the Supreme Court, but all three candidates were voted down after many of the GDDG lawmakers refused to support the nominations.
Electoral Bills
The outgoing Parliament has also failed to put on vote several legislative amendments, including two constitutional bills, related to electoral system reform.
Although the Parliament has passed number of electoral changes – among them redistricting of single-member constituencies to provide equal suffrage, as well as increasing threshold to 50% for a majoritarian candidate in single-member constituency to be an outright winner in the first round – it has failed to address the long-standing issue of changing mixed electoral system in which 77 MPs are elected in proportional, party-list race and 73 MPs in single-mandate constituencies.
The Parliament debated on two rival constitutional bills on electoral system reform. Both of them – one proposed by the GD parliamentary majority group and another one initiated by parliamentary and non-parliamentary opposition parties – envisage scrapping of the majoritarian component of the electoral system, but the main difference was over timing of the reform. The opposition-backed bill was proposing to carry out the reform immediately, ahead of the parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 8, and GD-backed bill was offering to apply the reform for the post-2016 elections.
The bills, however, have never been put on vote in the Parliament because of absence of quorum.
Any constitutional amendment requires support of at least 113 MPs and a vote cannot be held unless this number of minimum required lawmakers is present in the chamber.
Lawmakers from UNM, the largest opposition group in the legislative body with 45 MPs, have been boycotting parliamentary sittings due to the Kortskheli violent incident since late May.
In other election-related proposal, lawmakers from the Republican Party put forth a bill, backed by the opposition parties, designed to secure proportionality in distributing seats in the Parliament in the condition of maintaining mixed electoral system of party-list and majoritarian contests.
The bill, which was strongly opposed by the ruling GDDG party, was never put on vote because it had no chance of garnering enough votes without presence of UNM MPs. Even in case of presence of all 45 UNM MPs in the chamber the adoption of the bill seemed unlikely, but not entire ruled out.
The lack of quorum of required minimum 113 MPs also prevented the Parliament to put on vote a constitutional amendment, proposed by the ruling GDDG party, which, if approved, would have defined marriage as union of a man and a woman – something that is already defined by Georgia’s civil code.
