The Cape Verdean parliament will discuss a petition signed by 560 citizens calling for “more and better justice”, proposing measures to combat, among others, the “slowness of procedures” and the “corporativist spirit of judges”.
The petition, presented to the president of the National Assembly in 2021 by citizens Maurino de Camões Brito Delgado and Lívio da Conceição Silva, was discussed yesterday in the specialized committee on Constitutional Affairs, Human Rights, Security and State Reform, before being scheduled for discussion at the plenary meeting of parliament, proposing “some measures that they consider necessary to combat procedural slowness, the corporativist spirit of the judges, prevent risks of corruption in the system and promote greater guarantees to the citizen in demand with the State.
“For a swift and effective justice, requesting and expecting from the honourable Members diligence in this sense”, claim the proponents in the text of the petition.
Generally, the authors advocate changing the composition of the Superior Council of the Judiciary, the guarantee of “a better judicial inspection,” the approval of a procedural law, the computerization of the entire judicial system, an increase in the number of judges allocated to national courts and a review of the administrative litigation law.
Cape Verde’s courts closed last year with the lowest number of pending cases in several years, less than 10,200, although the number of decided cases dropped to 308 on average per judge.
According to the report for the judicial year ending last July (2021/2022), prepared by the CSMJ, “in recent years, the number of decided cases has been keeping pace with the number of incoming cases” in Cape Verdean courts.
“In the year to which the present report relates, 13,565 cases were decided, compared to 14,743 in the previous judicial year, that is, 1,178 fewer cases than in the previous year,” the document explains, whose history points to the second best year of productivity since 2015/2016 (11,696 cases decided in the country’s courts).
In the relationship between the number of cases resolved and entered, in 2021/2022 the number of cases tried was 13,565 (14,743 in the previous year), “which represents an annual average of 308 cases tried by each judge,” the document also states.
In 2017, Cape Verdean courts closed with 12,196 pending cases, a record that fell to 10,160 at the start of the new judicial year last October (2022/2023).
At the end of the 2021/2022 judicial year, the CSMJ had a total of seven counsellor judges, 11 associate judges and 51 judges of law – but only 55 in total in office – in addition to 217 justice officials, in this case 204 working in the courts.