The evaluation and development of the quality of justice in Hungary

Bencze, Mátyás and Kovács, Ágnes and Ződi, Zsolt (2017) The evaluation and development of the quality of justice in Hungary. In: Handle with Care Assessing and designing methods for evaluation and development of the quality of justice. IRSIG-CNR, pp. 1-47.

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Abstract

The empirical study focuses on the quality-assurance system of administration of justice. The key findings are as follow: The governance of the Hungarian judiciary is highly centralized. The advantage of this situation is that the central administration has been able and has done very effective steps to improve the timeliness of the adjudication, to reduce backlogs and to balance the disproportionate workload between courts and between judges of a court These steps rather quantity-orientated but there are signs of monitoring the quality of judicial work (by publishing appeal and quash rates by courts and putting emphasis on soft judicial skills in the process of selection and evaluation of judges) The disadvantage of this governance model is that judges feel pressure to please their immediate superiors who evaluate them and decide on their career within the judiciary (that can be a threat to autonomous decision-making). Bottom-up initiatives are relatively rare in the hierarchical system (though some of them are quite successful such as the complex motivational system elaborated and introduced at District Court of Debrecen) and hard to upscale them to national level The external perspective and demands of court users and other stakeholders are hardly channeled into the selection, evaluation and training processes of judges On the contrary, there are some remarkable efforts to make judgements understandable for the parties and to communicate them in a proper way to the wider public. The aim of these efforts is to strengthen the legitimacy of courts.

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