Poor Mojo's Newswire

Europe doesn’t like what is happening to the legal system in Hungary. These days in Hungary, one person picks all the judges. This judicial “czar” just announced today that she was filling 129 vacant judgeships. Only 23 of the newly assigned judges were already judges before. That means fully 106 of these positions are awarded to judicial newcomers. New judges enter the Hungarian legal system for three-year probationary terms, under the watchful eye of the very government that will decide on their reappointments. These judges, therefore, are independent at their peril, knowing that their jobs depend on how the government evaluates what they do. The judicial czar also has the power to assign specific cases to specific courts. Hungarian law specifies where cases are normally tried, but in Hungary’s new constitutional order, these usual rules can be overridden by the judicial czar who can transfer specific cases to courts other than the ones that are assigned by law. These transfers of cases do not have to be accompanied by reasons explaining why the judicial czar selected those cases or why they wound up in the courts that they did. What is to prevent Hungary’s judicial czar from picking the judges and then moving sensitive cases to the judges the government prefers? Not the law, at least not anymore. To Europe, these practices look like the political control of the judiciary. The rapid acceleration of European actions about the judiciary in recent weeks is a signal that Hungary has hit a European nerve. . . .

Iraqi activists sounded the bell over the killing of dozens of teenagers by religious police for having “emo” haircuts. Activists told the Cairo-based al-Akhbar daily that at least 90 Iraqi teenagers with “emo” appearances have been stoned to death by the Moral Police in the country in the past month. The violent crackdown against “emo” Iraqi teenagers came after the Iraqi interior ministry declared them as “devil worshippers.” “The ‘Emo phenomenon’ or devil worshiping is being probed by the Moral Police who have the approval to eliminate it as soon as possible since it’s detrimentally affecting the society and becoming a danger,” according to a statement by the interior ministry. “They wear strange, tight clothes that have pictures on them such as skulls and use stationery that are shaped as skulls. They also wear rings on their noses and tongues, and do other strange activities,” the statement added. The statement said that Iraq’s Moral Police was granted approval by the Ministry of Education to enter Baghdad schools and pinpoint students with Western appearances. . . .