The National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia will today continue the session at which they are deciding whether to appoint Damijan Florjančič as the President of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia. If Florjančič is elected, it will guarantee that after Branko Masleša nothing much will change in the judiciary of Slovenia.
We have already reported that the members of the Commission for Public Office and Elections proposed to the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia that they appoint the “infamous judge” Damijan Florjančič as the President of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia. About a week ago, at a session of the Commission, 11 members voted in favour, i.e. in favour of proposing the appointment of Florjančič as the President of the Supreme Court, while 5 members were against it.
Klemenčič supports him because he is supposedly a ‘career’ judge
Slovenian Minister of Justice Goran Klemenčič has said that he decided for Florjančič because he is a career judge. According to Klemenčič, Florjančič has walked the whole path from the Court of First Instance to the Supreme Court, and in between, as an assigned judge at the Ministry of Justice of Slovenia, he also performed tasks related to legislative procedures and the areas of training and education. He has also pointed out that Florjančič headed the District Court in Koper. Florjančič has been a Supreme Court judge since October 2010. Before that, in the years 2007 and 2008, he was assigned to the Ministry of Justice as a Higher Court judge, and in the period from 2008 to 2010, he was the Director of the Judicial Training Centre in Slovenia.
Florjančič has still not completely severed his ties with the Judicial Training Centre, where he was once the Director. Last year, for example, during the second embodiment of the two-day criminal justice school at the Bernardin hotel in Portorož, he lectured on the topic of Human Rights and Criminal Law. A man who had grievously violated the human rights of Janez Janša, Ivan Črnkovič, and Tone Krkovič in the Patria case lectured on human rights – an irony that is only possible in Slovenia. The Centre is currently headed by the Higher Court judge Tadeja Jelovšek, who (what a surprise) is the wife of the editor of the Saturday supplement of Delo Ali Žerdin.
‘Florjančič isn’t and will never be an acceptable candidate’
Vinko Gorenak has pointed out that for the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) Florjančič “isn’t and will never be an acceptable candidate” since he “violated human rights” while carrying out his work. Gorenak pointed out that the controversial judge had been involved in the judicial proceedings of the Patria case and that with regards to this case “the Constitutional Court of Slovenia found that the judges had passed judgement for something that isn’t a criminal offence. Therefore, everyone who’d been involved had violated human rights”. He also noted that in this case the National Assembly of Slovenia had unlawfully deprived President of SDS Janez Janša of his parliamentary mandate.
M. S.