Days ago, Law no. 327 of 2024 was issued, renewing the appointment of five Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) members whose terms had expired and extending the age of retirement for several judges – foremost among them Acting Cassation Public Prosecutor Jamal Hajjar and Financial Public Prosecutor Ali Ibrahim – based on arbitrary conditions. The law also includes a clause making an acting cassation public prosecutor an ex officio member of the SJC and its vice president, just like a substantive cassation public prosecutor.

This law is very dangerous for the following reasons:

• Most of this law’s clauses were leaked to Parliament without the MPs, the judicial bodies, or the general public having the opportunity to review or debate them. They were adopted by the will of the parliament speaker without any vote. It is now known that the version read out in Parliament was amended when the law was issued. These are dangerous practices that open the door for constitutional gains and guarantees won through long struggles to be destroyed behind closed doors in a moment of carelessness.
• While the efforts to reform the judiciary aim to strengthen the independence of SJC members, this law goes in the opposite direction by making them vulnerable, thereby weakening the SJC and its ability to safeguard the judiciary’s independence. This it does by reviving the terms of outgoing members and granting ex officio membership to judges occupying their positions in an acting capacity, i.e. in a fragile capacity under the control of one person.
• Finally, the law sets a dangerous precedent by extending the retirement age for specific judges. For the first time in the judiciary’s history, the retirement age is being extended for judges based on arbitrary conditions cleverly crafted so that specific judges (namely public prosecutors Hajjar and Ibrahim) benefit from the extension while other, unfavored judges (namely Cases Authority President Helena Iskandar) are denied it. Setting this precedent in Lebanon restores practices that have occurred in the Arab region and involve manipulating judges’ retirement age in a manner that bolsters the ruling authority’s ability to control judicial affairs.

Hence, while the Independence of the Judiciary Coalition supports the Lebanese Judges Association’s opposition to this law and the challenges that MPs have filed or may file against it, we call upon the Constitutional Council to put judicial independence first by nullifying this law in the hope that constitutional order can be restored in this regard. We also call upon democratic MPs to emphasize the priority of finishing the two laws on the independence of the judicial, administrative, and financial judiciaries and transforming the Military Court from an exceptional court into a specialized court whose jurisdiction is limited to military cases. The time has come to build institutions, after so much destruction.

To read this statement in Arabic