Challenging Corruption in Judicial Systems

Transcript

ARYEH NEIER: Aristotle wrote more than 2,000 years in the "Nicomachean Ethics" that the duty of a judge is to embody justice and if judges do not embody justice, I think it is inevitable that citizens in any country will seek alternative means for trying to deal with their grievances. All the other means available to them probably involve gaining power, and while it is possible to gain power democratically, it is also possible to gain power by the use of force. In many countries I think that the problem that judges do not embody justice is part of what turns those with grievances toward ways of trying to resolve those grievances that can cause a great deal of harm.

I want to study this report closely to get ideas and insights and I want my colleagues in the Open Society Institute to do the same. A lot of the countries, the great majority of the countries, that we work in have jurisprudence or legal systems that derive from civil-law traditions rather than common-law traditions. One of the essays in this report is by Susan Rose-Ackerman and it deals specifically with the difficulties or the problem both in the civil-law systems and in the common-law systems which are quite different. But it is the civil-law systems that we run into most of the time, and reading through Susan's essay it seemed to me that she touched on just the kinds of difficulties that we encounter.

To take one example, she pointed out that in civil-law systems it is often the case that lower-level judges have to share bribes with the higher-level judges who control their appointments, and there is a story that George Soros likes to tell which illustrates the point. He had said something a number of years ago when he was visiting Georgia—that is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, not Georgia in the United States—about the problem of judicial corruption. Thereafter he got a request for a grant which was somewhat different from anything he had received previously. A judge asked for a grant and said that he was very eager not to behave corruptly, he did not want to take bribes, but he would still have to pay a share of the bribes he was supposed to get to the higher-level judges and would the Open Society Institute give him a grant so that he could continue to pay the higher-level judges, and I don't think he intended this humorously. I think he actually thought that this was a way of overcoming the corruption that he engaged in. It seems to me to reflect the deep entrenchment of systems of that sort and the immense difficulty of trying to deal with those problems.

View Full Transcript »