New study on case allocation in courts: Current system does not prevent abuse

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee published a new study on case allocation in Hungarian courts. According to the findings of the study, the rules regulating which case will be decided by which judge (the case allocation schemes) are overly flexible and do not prevent the possibility that sensitive or politically important cases can be allocated to “reliable” judges who will adjudicate according to political interests.

One of the most important recommendations of the study is that case allocation should be removed from the judicial leader who is also responsible for performance evaluation, because it provides room for abuse. The study also recommends to radically simplify the case allocation schemes and to remove the extremely high number of exceptions. Moreover, procedural guarantees should be added to ensure transparency and accountability. Finally, the study recommends to have predictable and, where possible, automated case allocation methods.

The study is available here.