A state run by judges?
Is our country run by judges? Is our judiciary intervening in the operation of executive and legislative authorities? Economy Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis believes so. Judges are setting their own wages and, irrespective of budget limits, they are receiving them, even retroactively. At the moment, judges are claiming -1.5 billion in back pay – a huge sum for a budget that has been under European Commission supervision and at least twice the amount earmarked for pensioners and the poor. But why is this happening? The Constitution specifies that «the salary of judges should be proportionate to their office.» Subsequent judicial rulings, however, dictated that the salary of the Supreme Court president should be higher than that of any other civil servant, setting the wage ceiling at -6,400 a month. A wage tribunal, created to assess salary discrepancies, recently handled the case of certain Economy Ministry officials whose salaries, including benefits, were higher than Supreme Court president’s. The government smoothed out those differences. But this year, doubts have again been raised with the case of the president of the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission (EETT), appointed by the previous government, who had allegedly been pocketing -10,300 a month. Although the judges were told that the EETT president was not a civil servant but a private sector official on a five-year contract, the wage tribunal decided that the Supreme Court president deserved a raise of at least -3,000 a month, which he should receive retroactively for five years and with interest. The tribunal’s decision came out in January, an appeal was made in February and within a month a decision was made to grant him -180,000. Another 4,500 such appeals followed and now the state must pay these judges -1.5 billion it does not have.
