Requested by: North Macedonia, Prime Minister

Recommended Measures:
• The authorities are invited to assess whether the majorities/special majorities required in the Plenary of the Judicial Council (the JC) to take decisions on the appointment and promotion of judges, or on the disciplinary liability of judges and members of the JC are realistic. The decision-making process should be designed in such a way as to ensure that the Plenary of the JC would not find itself in the situations where it would be impossible or extremely difficult to take a decision; • As regards the disciplinary procedure, the law should provide for a filtering mechanism for the complaints submitted against judges directly to the JC; the power to decide on the admissibility of the complaints might be given, instead of the Plenary of the JC, to a smaller body within the JC. The Appeal Council should have a final say on the appeal against a disciplinary sanction imposed by the JC, but, at the same time, the Appeal Council should act with deference to the JC, and should be able to annul decisions of the JC only in cases of gross errors in the application of procedural and substantive law; • The procedure of recruitment of judges needs to be explained more clearly in the law. In particular, the law should specify what role the ranking of candidates established by the Academy for Judges and Public Prosecutors plays in the selection process, and how it affects the voting by the JC, and what is the place of any “integrity and psychological tests” which may be conducted by the JC in the selection process; • The relative weight of various parameters accounted for in the performance evaluation should be kept under constant revision. It is more appropriate to attribute the exact numerical values to those parameters in the regulations adopted by the JC, rather than in the law itself, in order to be able to change them if needed. The law should explain how the scores obtained in the performance evaluations affect the decisions of the Plenary of the JC concerning the promotion of the judges.

Measures taken: At its 118th Plenary Session in March 2019, the Venice Commission adopted an opinion on the draft law on the Judicial Council. The law was then adopted on 16 May 2019 by the Parliament and published on 22 May 2019 in the Official Gazette n° 102. The adopted Law followed most of the recommendations made in the opinion of the Venice Commission. The system of disciplinary proceedings and performance evaluations is simpler and more internally coherent. On some issues it is important to see how the two laws would be implemented in practice. This concerns, for example, the limited role of the Appeals Council in the disciplinary proceedings, the majorities needed to take certain decisions, and the system of attribution of points within the performance evaluation process. On 9 March 2023, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of North Macedonia found that the provision stipulating that the President of the Judicial Council is elected from among lay, not judicial, members of the Council elected by the Assembly of the Republic of North Macedonia (a provision that had been introduced in the law following the adoption of the Venice Commission Opinion), creates a distinction between the two categories of members and runs counter to the principle of equality and violates the principle of the separation of powers. The new President and his Deputy, elected in May and June 2023, are both judges.