Judges on Trial

Shimon Shetreet is the Greenblatt chair of public and international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, where he is a past chairman of the Sacher Institute of Legislative Research and Comparative Law. In 1980, he served as a member of the Chief Justice Landau Commission on the Israeli Court System and is President of the International Association of Judicial Independence. Between 1988 and 1996 he served as a Member of the Israeli Parliament, and was a cabinet minister under Yitshak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Sophie Turenne is a Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, where she teaches comparative law, constitutional law and European law. She was one of a number of experts who took part in an OSCE-ODIHR Research Project, which lead to the publication in 2010 of the 'Kyiv Recommendations on Judicial Independence in Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia'. She will act as General Reporter on the topic of judicial independence at the nineteenth International Congress of Comparative Law in Vienna (July 2014).

• 1. Introduction; 2. Constitutional steps towards judicial independence; 3. The structure and governance of the English judiciary; 4. Judicial appointments; 5. Standards of conduct on the bench; 6. Standards of conduct in extra-judicial activities; 7. Immunity, discipline and removal of judges; 8. Freedom of expression and public confidence in the judiciary; 9. Conclusion.