Public Integrity Council: Results of the Third Term and Priorities for Further Development
The third term of the Public Integrity Council, which lasted from August 2023 to August 2025, marked the resumption of active civil society oversight of judicial qualification assessment after a prolonged hiatus. During this period, the PIC adopted 581 decisions, including 386 decisions approving opinions that judges or judicial candidates did not meet the criteria of professional ethics and integrity.
The report identifies several priorities for further development
- speed up decisions on judicial appointments and dismissals and ensure consistent approaches among the institutions involved
- allow facts and conduct previously assessed by a body involving international experts to be reassessed in later procedures, since its findings should not be treated as final and binding when the same circumstances are examined in a different context
- ensure that the PIC assesses similar cases consistently
- establish a full-fledged PIC secretariat and regulate its analysts’ access to the data needed for thorough checks
- give civil society organisations more time to nominate PIC members and make the selection process more transparent through public interviews and livestreamed meetings
In this report, the DEJURE Foundation analyses the PIC’s work through statistics and individual cases, examines the institutional changes that took place during its third term, and presents recommendations for its further development.
