On Friday, February 1, Janis Bordans, the Minister of Justice, and Irena Kucina, the Deputy State Secretary on Justice Matters, had a meeting with the management of the Riga Regional Court and Riga region courts to analyse efficiency of operations of courts and discuss any required improvements on the justice proceedings.
Janis Bordans, the Minister of Justice, stressed the role of quality of judgements, arguing: “Rather often the work of courts is judged solely by the speed of examination of cases, which is clearly one of the most important indicators, but from here on out I wish that the main efficiency criteria of courts is the ability to reach justice through qualitative judgements in all justice processes and instances. Along with higher quality, there will be better performance results and fair outcome of court proceedings.”
Several problems were discussed during the meeting, discussing any possible solutions to improve the court processes, e.g. assessment of advocate and prosecutor procedural duties and performance thereof. Furthermore, the participants of the meeting discussed the issue of dishonest use of procedural resources, as well as recognized lack of shared understanding as to the complete use of procedural resources in court practice.
The identified problems will be more discussed with judges, advocates and prosecutors to find shared solutions and thus speed up the court proceedings and make them more effective along the way.