Macedonian Judges Reject Political Pressure

“The situation has reached a point where some spread ideas that the Constitutional Court is the very brake for the social development of the state, that this institution is predetermined to destroy the state,” he noted at Tuesday’s press conference.

The court last year was put under the spotlight by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and his ruling centre-right VMRO-DPMNE party after it overruled several government initiatives.

Gruevski, the VMRO-DPMNE and various NGOs that local media affiliated with the ruling party slammed the court as being a puppet of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, SDSM.

The most recent jab came earlier this month after the court temporarily froze several provisions of the new lustration law that was drafted to shed light on former secret service informants.

“We are the greatest supporters of the lustration but we do not have influence on the Constitutional Court,” Gruevski said. “There is another party which unfortunately does have influence,” he noted, hinting that SDSM was somehow involved in the decision.

“The Constitutional Court is the body which determines whether a disputed provision is constitutional or not. If political parties and their loudspeakers take that role then we lose the state and the rule of law,” Constitutional Court President Ivanovski argued.

Last year the court overruled more than fifty disputed provisions. The prime minister criticized the court when it rejected the government initiative to introduce religious classes in elementary schools, ruling that it went against the secular character of the state.

The court also scrapped the provision offering state subsidies to couples with more than two children, calling it discriminatory as it only applied to those areas of the state with low birth rates.

“The court has been accustomed to political pressure since its formation half a century ago, so we will not succumb to the latest manifestations of this practice,” Ivanovski said.

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