Independence of the Judiciary

one of the democratic constitutional principles of the socialist system of law, according to which judges, in rendering a judgment (sentence, ruling, or order), are not bound by any influences outside the system of law and are obliged to be guided entirely by the law in conformity with their socialist legal consciousness (for example, Constitution of the USSR, art. 112).

The organizational structure of the judicial system in socialist states excludes any influence by higher-ranking agencies (judicial or other) on decisions or judgments rendered by the court in specific cases. To ensure the organizational independence of the court, legislation in the socialist countries provides for numerous guarantees, including the election of judges and people’s assessors at all levels of the judicial system, the right of voters to recall judges who have lost their trust, and a special system of legal and disciplinary responsibility for judges. There are also legal guarantees of independence of the judiciary, such as the directness, continuity, and oral nature of judicial examination, the right to challenge a judge, and the privacy of the judges’ conference room.

The members of a particular court panel are independent of one another in rendering a judgment or sentence; this is ensured by giving each member of the court equal rights (each judge may announce his own opinion).

In the bourgeois states, the position of the judiciary in the state mechanism is theoretically based on the principle of separation of powers, according to which there are supposedly three independent agencies of power in the state: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. In fact, however, judges are appointed by the head of state in most of the bourgeois countries, and usually they cannot be replaced. This practice alone indicates that the bourgeois court and judges are subordinate to the interests of the ruling classes and makes judges dependent on higher agencies of government.