Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Not the same court

A commenter asks if it wasn’t some other court that ruled on the election in the OR rather than the constitutional court. The answer is that it was a different court so I got it wrong.

So it isn’t the same court, but I will say that it’s really the judiciary as a whole that doesn’t come off looking all that well. The election decision by the Supreme Court was a declaration of independence of sorts by at least some judges. And that independence should have been defended then and continued to be defended now fiercely by the rest of them. It hasn’t been though. With the judiciary, it’s business as usual. And the Stanik stuff and the two judges talking nonsense about political questions just serves to tar them all further.

A couple of years back, when we lived in Kiev, our apartment complex was looking to set up a western style homeowner’s association. There was a lot of opposition to it for reasons that we won’t get into. But I remember one woman purported to be a lawyer who kept waving a paper she said was a decision of a court invalidating a homeowner’s association in the same area. For her and for some others, that carried the argument against.

Problem with it is that I could have come up with any number of decisions saying the exact opposite. All I needed to do was to find the right person who could get access or who knew the right person who could get access, meet the requirement whatever that was and voila! In other words, as a matter of law it meant nothing.

It did though seem that with the OR what the judiciary did or at least a portion of them did meant something and that they wanted it to mean something, that is, they wanted to stand up and do what they were supposed to do. It doesn’t look that way now and no one who has a stake in it is saying anything about it. That’s a pity.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

who kept waving a paper

Ah, the infamous dreaded paper! And I am sure it had a pechatka on it :) That seal means everything and on paper it rules. But in reality just a tissue really.