While all branches of the Lebanese judiciary are suffering from high rates of vacancies in their cadres, the vacancy rate is the highest in the Court of Accounts (CoA), where approximately 50% of the judge positions remain vacant. The issue of vacancies in the CoA’s cadre has featured repeatedly in Parliament’s work as an obstacle to restoring financial public order to the state and, in particular, completing overdue closure-of-accounts laws [i.e. audits of previous public budgets]. Since 1993, when the last closure-of-accounts law was issued, all public budget laws have been marred by a glaring violation of Article 87 of the Constitution. The latter stipulates that the previous year’s financial accounts must be approved before the annual budget is adopted. The Constitutional Council continues to turn a blind eye to this violation on the basis that it has become a chronic “anomalous situation” and that issuing a budget without a closure of accounts is better than not issuing one at all.

This issue has come up time and time again, to the extent that expedited laws have been enacted to address it. Proposed solutions, however, have been legislative ones that, in particular, expand the CoA’s legally-stipulated cadre. These solutions have not led to any practical steps to rectify the vacancies. Neither was it accompanied by the Ministry of Finance’s submission of all the previous years’ accounts that are subject to audit to the CoA. The few appointments that the forces in power have made to reduce these vacancies were aimed more at achieving a sectarian balance at the top of the CoA’s hierarchy (the chamber presidents) than at actually addressing the vacancies. All of the transferred judges from the judicial judiciary were parachuted into these positions. Conversely, the last competitive exam for entry into the financial department of the Institute of Judicial Studies (IJS) was held in 1998, i.e. 26 years ago. Similarly, the last exam restricted to controllers and auditors was held in 2003 (an attempt to hold such an exam in 2012 came up against several factional and personal considerations).

The past drain in CoA cadres due to lack of replacements took place during the 1975-1990 war. The current vacancies, by contrast, stem more from the policies adopted during peacetime than from the crises of the war. As we demonstrate below, measures to address the vacancies that emerged during the war were adopted between 1991 and 2003. Thereafter they ceased completely.

1990-2003: Measures to Address the War’s After Effects

In the wake of the 1975-1990 war, eight judges remained in actual service (CoA report, 1992). In 1992, five more judges were appointed as a result of an exam restricted to controllers held the previous year. Subsequently, the vacancy rate among the CoA’s judges stood at approximately 64%, while the vacancy rate among all CoA staff stood at 82%, according to the CoA report published in 1992.

Hence, addressing the shortage in human resources was considered the most significant challenge facing the CoA after the war. In this regard, one former CoA controller told the Legal Agenda that then CoA president Abdullah Nasser managed, in coordination with Parliament Speaker Hussein el-Husseini, to push through Law no. 132 of 14 April 1992, which expanded the CoA’s cadre from 24 to 36 judges and from 14 to 30 auditors (the number of controllers remained 50). A mechanism to help achieve this goal was also established, namely the creation of a financial law department inside the IJS. In other words, financial judges would be selected after training in the IJS, just like judicial and administrative judges.

Subsequently, four open exams for entry into the IJS were held between 1993 and 1998, leading to the appointment of a total of 22 trainee judges. These trainees were appointed as accredited judges after completing their IJS training in 1997, 1999, and 2001.[1] Three exams restricted to controllers were also held in the post-war period in 1991, 1992, and 2003, leading to the appointment of 11 accredited judges in 1992, 1994, and 2003. No exam has since been held.

Hence, a total of 33 judges were appointed during this period. Seven of them have retired, two have transferred to work in other administrations, and one passed away. Therefore, 23 are still working in the CoA.

The Stabilization of Vacancies in the Post-2003 Era

After the first post-war decade, we witnessed a major shift in the way that vacancies were addressed. The first sign of this shift was the lack of any exam for entry into the IJS. Similarly, since that time no exam restricted to controllers or auditors had been called. Hence, the number of judges began again declining, reaching 25 of the 36 stipulated in the 1992 law in 2012. From the general vacancy crisis in the CoA, a crisis of vacancies in its top position emerged as a result of the political crisis that followed the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, especially between 2005 and 2008. The CoA’s presidency remained vacant from 2006 to 2010, and the chamber presidencies remained vacant from 2007 and 2019 in a situation that also shut down the CoA’s council due to the loss of most of its members.

The first legislative debate about the need to address these vacancies occurred when Parliament’s General Assembly examined a bill presented by MPs Ibrahim Kanaan and Yassine Jaber in 2011. The bill sought to expand the CoA’s stipulated cadre and thereby bolster its human resources. The request was justified based on an objective change comprising two factors. The first factor, which was structural, was the twelvefold increase of total budget allocations between 1992 (when the CoA’s cadre was last amended) and 2012. The second factor, which was constitutional and circumstantial, was the need to “adopt the 2012 budget bill by the deadlines set in the Constitution”. This would “require that the Ministry of Finance prepares the task accounts and closure of accounts up to at least 2010 [i.e. for a 17-year period as the last closure of accounts was for 1993] and that the CoA then audit and rule on these accounts within the deadlines set by the laws and regulations. The latter is virtually impossible given the human resources (judges and auditors) currently stipulated for the CoA’s cadre”. The fact that the bill’s presenters raised this constitutional imperative to justify expediting it (despite the existence of a governmental bill to amend the law regulating the CoA) indicates that they hoped to increase the number of CoA judges not by the usual means, i.e. by appointing IJS graduates (who would first need to complete three years of training). Rather, they sought to use faster channels, particularly an exam restricted to controllers and auditors. Parliament ended up increasing the number of chambers from six to eight, the number of judges from 36 to 50, and the number of auditors from 30 to 50 while leaving the number of controllers unchanged.

The adoption of this law was coupled with an announcement by political forces (namely the Free Patriotic Movement and the Future Movement) of their desire to restore sectarian balance to the CoA’s chambers, controllers, and auditors. This desire appeared in no uncertain terms in the rationale section of Law 222 of 2012, which amended the CoA’s cadre, and the parliamentary debates over it. The rationale explicitly stated that, “Filling these positions requires observing the exigencies of national consensus and the prevailing customs, which allow the appointment of chamber presidents from outside the CoA’s cadre, and hence an amendment to Article 5 of Legislative Decree 118 of 1959”. In other words, to preserve the sectarian balance, judicial or administrative judges from outside the CoA were permitted to preside over chambers therein, contrary to what the law had stipulated before the amendment. Parliament’s General Assembly insisted on introducing this change even though former minister of justice Chakib Kortbawi warned, during the debate on the law expanding the CoA’s cadre, against emptying the judicial and administrative branches of the judiciary, which were already suffering from a shortage of judges. This opposition met with an immediate response from MP Abbas Hachem (who belongs to the same political faction as Kortbawi, namely the Free Patriotic Movement). Hachem stated that the justification for the article was the need to ensure sectarian balance: “In reality, this article did not appear in the bill at all, but it was added at the behest of the CoA’s president in order to ensure sectarian balance. Therefore, it should not be removed”.

Although the law was adopted in an expedited manner on the basis that it was urgently needed, it produced none of its intended effects as the political forces disagreed on whether it was appropriate to hold an exam for appointing CoA judges (namely chamber counselors) from among its controllers and auditors who possess law degrees. The reasons for this disagreement were unclear, although some controllers and auditors disclosed to the Legal Agenda that they were related to personal and sectarian considerations, particularly as the amendment deprived broad groups of controllers of the ability to sit the exam by retaining the condition of 10 years of service. Similarly, no exam for entry into the IJS’ financial section was held, nor was any exam to increase the number of CoA workers of any category. Consequently, to this day the CoA remains incapable of accomplishing the task expected of it. The crisis did not trigger any political conflict or protest.

Thereafter, we witnessed several more parliamentary debates about the CoA vacancies during the discussions of public budget laws. The repeated justification was the need to issue these budgets before a closure-of-accounts law for previous years was adopted. Thus, when adopting the 2017 budget without a closure of accounts, Parliament justified this violation by pledging to complete a closure of accounts for the previous years, beginning from 1993, within six months (a deadline before which it would also adopt the 2018 budget). After failing to fulfil this pledge, Parliament justified the adoption of the 2019 budget in the absence of a closure of accounts on the basis of the “need for financial order” with a parallel law (Law no. 143 of 2019) that obligated the government to refer the closure-of-accounts drafts for 1993 onwards within six months, which never occurred. It did the same in the 2024 budget via an article that the Finance Committee added. These repeated pledges and debates, in the absence of any steps to put them into effect, seemed to be merely an excuse to justify the failure to complete closure-of-accounts laws on the basis of the CoA’s circumstances and shortage of resources, particularly human resources. The vacancies in the CoA appear to have turned from an institutional problem blocking the completion of constitutionally binding measures into an argument – or perhaps even a perfect ploy – enabling the political authority to free itself from the obligation to provide accounts for the implementation of public budgets. In other words, the vacancies have become a pretext for the political authority to liberate itself from the Constitution.

While refraining from any measure to fill the vacancies, the executive branch has had no qualms about transferring or seconding CoA judges to other administrations. The latest transfer decree moved Judge Marwan Abboud, just months after he was appointed president of a CoA chamber, to the Ministry of Interior and Municipalities. He was then appointed governor of the City of Beirut on 16 June 2020. The latest secondment temporarily placed Judge Khaled Akkari, who also presides over a CoA chamber, at the disposal of the prime minister (Hassan Diab at the time) to provide advisory, legal, and administrative services. While doing so, Akkari was prohibited from performing his tasks in the CoA (his services were terminated when he resigned in 2023). These transfers and secondments conflict with the proper administration of the public service. According to the latter, judicial capacities must be conserved when they are scarce, as is the case in the CoA given its many vacancies and the volume of work expected of it. Moreover, this practice has involved not only the CoA’s judges but also its controllers. On 10 June 2020, First Controller in the CoA Pauline Dib was appointed governor of the newly created Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate, although this decision was later contested for various reasons.

Since 2003, the only appointments to occur in the CoA have been appointments of judicial or administrative judges to senior positions (the presidency, the chamber presidencies, and the public prosecutor’s office) via decrees. These judges total six, and three are still working in the CoA. Specifically, this mechanism was used to appoint, from the judicial or administrative judiciary, CoA presidents Aouni Ramadan, Ahmed Hamdan, and Mohamad Badran, who was appointed in September 2019 and still occupies the position today. Similarly, the mechanism was employed to appoint the CoA’s public prosecutor (Fawzi Khamis) in 2012 and to appoint two chamber presidents in September 2019 (Jamal Mahmoud and Khaled Akkari) in order to ensure sectarian balance in the chamber presidencies.

These facts indicate that a shift occurred in the political authority’s approach to the CoA’s human resources. During the first decade of the post-war era, systematic measures were adopted to increase these resources and almost rectified the vacancies. These measures then ceased completely, even though the vacancies transformed into an institutional issue that came up periodically when public budgets were debated. Do these vacancies remain prevalent only because of administrative neglect, or are they deliberately perpetuated by influential political forces at one stage or another in order to block oversight work and potential accountability? The latter hypothesis is strengthened by the timing of this shift, particularly the suspension of the IJS’ financial department and its entrance exams. Specifically, it came immediately after a short-lived experience of accountability based on CoA reports that took place at the outset of President Émile Lahoud’s term in 1999.

[1] Five judges by Decree no. 10698 of 1997.

Six judges by Decree no. 177 of 1999.

Six judges by Decree no. 1081 of 1999.

Five judges by Decree no. 6033 of 2001.

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.