A DISCRIMINATION lawsuit filed by retired judge Jozef Soročina was dismissed by the Bratislava I District Court, but the judge’s lawyer, Juraj Kus, stated that the case would be appealed, the SITA newswire wrote.
In his decision, Judge Branislav Král noted that discrimination did exist in the salaries between judges serving on Slovakia’s former Special Court, created to hear cases involving high-level corruption and organised crime, and the salaries of judges serving in normal district and regional courts. But to eliminate the discrimination by paying the difference between the two levels of salaries now would again result in discrimination against other judges, he ruled.
“It would have been a completely different situation if initially all judges were entitled to such a claim that would then be only awarded to judges of the Special Court,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
When the Constitutional Court previously ruled that the higher pay for judges of the Special Court was contrary to Slovakia’s Constitution, this provided reasonable moral satisfaction to the judges, Král wrote, adding that only in the event that this had harmed the judges’ dignity to a large extent should financial compensation for non-pecuniary damages be considered. The judge wrote that no such harm had been proven in this case.
Eleven judges from Slovakia’s Supreme Court have been successful in similar wage discrimination lawsuits, but the court president, Štefan Harabin, has helped them by not appealing first-instance verdicts, SITA wrote.
