THE DORMANCY OF PARLIAMENTS: THE INVISIBLE CAUSE OF JUDICIARY EMPOWERMENT IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

Abstract

The exceptional empowerment of the judiciary lately transpiring across post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) exhibits an institutional design uniformity that reflects a common origin in a networked, transnational legal professional epistemic community-cum-community of interest. Their template's success, however, heretofore inadequately explained, is traceable to an equally important but less observable causal factor: the dormancy of CEE parliaments. This article explores the phenomenon in its three modes: dormancy in originating norms; in overseeing designers; and in vetoing one's own disempowerment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my interviewees, each one of whom gave their precious time to answer my questions; to the British Academy who funded the Postdoctoral Fellowship during which some of the empirical data presented here was collected; the John Fell Fund (University of Oxford) who funded part of this research; and the Law Faculty (Oxford) who contributed supplementary funding; and to the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society for the support they gave towards the final stages of this research. The views expressed herein are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the position of her employers.

Notes

1 If magistrates do not hold the majority of seats on a CC then arguably such a court is not properly counted as part of the judiciary. In CEE the politicians continue to dominate CCs but the drive is on to change that in accordance with the template (Parau forthcoming, 2014).

2 More than 100 such interviews were conducted between 2008 and 2012, yielding a wealth of original data. For reason of space only a few of these interviews could be cited in sufficient length. Interview transcripts are available upon request.

3 In practice the governance of the judiciary operates as if a Judiciary Council actually exists (Kühn 2011).

4 Author interview with senior civil servant, Ministry of Justice in Moldova, Chisinau, 2 November 2012.

Additional information

Cristina E. Parau is currently a lecturer in European Politics and Societies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She also holds a CO-POLIS Fellowship from the University of Trento (Italy), researching the politics of UK constitutionalism. Having held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship researching judicial independence in post-communist CEE countries, she has been published in West European Politics, Europe-Asia Studies and the Max Planck Institute's Comparative and International Law Series. West European Politics awarded her their Vincent Wright Prize in 2010 for best contribution towards understanding comparative European politics. Email: [email protected]