One version of an interdepartmental review conducted by the Justice Ministry calls for the special function surcharges that judges on the Special Court and Supreme Court receive to be cut from more than Sk115,000 a month to less than a tenth of that amount, the SITA newswire wrote.
The first version of the review cuts the surcharge to Sk3,000 a month, while the second reduces it to about Sk10,000. Currently, the special monthly surcharge is calculated at six times the average national wage, which was Sk19,208 over the first three months of last year. This amounts to Sk115,248 a month.
The Cabinet adopted a plan to cut the surcharges in mid January as a way of putting the courts’ judges on equal footing with lower court judges.
Justice Minister Štefan Harabin has been an outspoken critic of the Special Court, which was set up by the previous centre-right government to deal with corruption and organised crime cases, and has called for it to be abolished.
After the prime minister’s Smer party blocked those efforts, Harabin turned to expanding the courts’ jurisdiction and decreasing its judges’ salaries.
Compiled by Jana Liptáková from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
