Summarizing the case, the Bar Association proposes to draw co-judges from the National Register of Citizens in order to better reflect the population. Today’s co-judges in Norway are older, richer and more “Norwegian” than most people, a major news investigation shows. Municipalities are currently responsible for electing co-judges every four years, but the method has not worked well enough to ensure representativeness. The Ministry of Justice and Emergency Preparedness believes that the current arrangement is good enough. The summary is made by an AI service from OpenAi. The content is quality assured by news’s journalists before publication. – We believe the rules should be changed, says general secretary Merete Smith of the Bar Association. news recently talked about how those who judge us do not reflect the population, as the law requires. The co-judges in Norway are older, richer and more “Norwegian” than most people. And that also affects the penalties. – news’s investigation confirms what we have suspected. We think that you have to find another way to choose co-judges, says Smith. The Bar Association’s proposal is to simply draw random adults from the National Register of Citizens. Then you will be summoned to be a judge. How would you have reacted to being told that you had to be a judge in a court case? Positive😊 I happily do my civic duty! Negative😡 I don’t want/can’t be a co-judge. Neither positive nor negative😐 Show result Norwegian municipalities choose Norwegian municipalities are responsible for choosing co-judges for their local court every four years. Most co-judges volunteer, but in some cases the municipality also has to ask people. By the summer, 38,000 new co-judges are to be elected. The very smallest municipalities must find as few as four or five people. Oslo, on the other hand, must provide 7,500. But as news has documented, this method has not worked well enough if the goal is for the co-judges to reflect the population. Merete Smith believes that you have to think anew. – We believe that you can draw from the National Register, and then find a way to exclude those who are not eligible as co-judges, she says. – Then you will get the entire breadth of the population. Has been proposed before Already in 2002, the government-appointed Lay Judge Committee suggested doing it this way. When the proposal was submitted for consultation, it was met with great skepticism from the courts. The Ministry of Justice summed it up like this, before putting the proposal aside: “There is a particular lack of certainty that the candidates will be suitable for the position, which justifies the skepticism.” At the latest in May last year, the Socialist Left Party (SV) tried again to propose a review of the entire scheme. Justice policy spokesperson Andreas Sjalg Unneland believes the co-judge scheme does not work as it should. – Today, you are judged in practice by an elderly council that grew up in a completely different time, he says. But all the major parties voted against. In the debate that followed, Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl (Sp) also said no to going through with the scheme. Minister of Justice Emilie Enger Mehl (Sp) stated in a debate in the Storting last year that it is possible to create more representative selections among the fellow judges without changing the current system. Photo: William Jobling / news news has been trying for a long time to get a comment from the Minister of Justice, but she has not wanted to be interviewed. In an e-mail, the Department of Justice and Emergency Preparedness replies that they believe the current arrangement is good enough, because it already requires that the co-judges must represent all parts of the population: – In the case of a random draw, those selected for the selections will not necessarily have a desire to participate in the court as co-judges, writes the ministry. – Random drawing could also lead to the court being sat with co-judges who, for various reasons, are not suitable for such a task. A suitability check will therefore be necessary afterwards. The result would probably not have been so representative after such a check, adds the ministry. No one supervises Ingunn Foss from the Conservative Party sits on the justice committee in the Storting and believes that the municipalities should be able to clean this up. – The municipalities must choose people who reflect the population in an area in a better way than they do today, says Ingunn Foss (H). At the same time, there is no supervisory authority that holds each municipality responsible for whether they manage to mirror their citizens. The state administrators are only involved if someone complains about the selection of co-judges. news has asked the country’s state administrators, but none of them have dealt with any complaints about this in the past twelve years. news corrects: In an earlier version it was stated that Merete Smith believed that one should look at how they do it in the USA. This is not correct and has now been removed.
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The Bar Association will draw random judges from the Folkeregisteret – news Østfold – Local news, TV and radio
