Mr. Gorundu, in your opinion, do you feel that the Regional Bar and Court Examiner system have been a significant improvement to the previous Attorney General system it replaced? And if so, why?
I do believe the new system is a considerable improvement over the old Attorney General system. I will preface by saying that there were actually two significant changes to the justice system after the Attorney General was abolished - firstly the concept of delegate-appointed prosecutors was introduced as a replacement for the Attorney General, and then some time after that the Regional Bar and the Court Examiner were created to address issues caused by that system.
I'll talk about the first set of changes first. The Attorney General position was one that barely had anything to do most of the time, and when there was something to do it was more likely than not to stir up controversy over decisions on which cases it chose to prosecute. The new system democratised the process by allowing any citizen to present a potential crime to the Court instead of one person acting as a (sometimes politically motivated) filter. While the new system might have resulted in more cases being filed, no one has abused the system and it didn't really result in any additional burden on the system because the Court itself is still able to act as a filter in determining which cases actually had legal merit and should proceed to trial. So all in all the initial abolishment and replacement of the Attorney General is a positive change in my opinion, but it was refined further by the Regional Bar and Court Examiner additions.
The Regional Bar addressed the issue of prosecutors having to be confirmed by the Regional Assembly for every case, as it often took up time and made cases stretch out for too long. It's not exactly a perfect solution, mostly because it also created a Bar Commission to determine who can be admitted to the Bar, which made for a lot of new positions that didn't have a lot to do, and in fact sometimes the people who were supposed to appoint Bar Commissioners forgot to do so because it is so forgettable. But the Commission did its job when it needs to.
The Court Examiner addressed a separate issue related Requests For Reviews - the Attorney General used to have the power to bring any (non-crime-related) legal issue for review in front the Court, but when the position was abolished that power went away. After that, only someone directed affected by a legal issue could bring something for review, and we found ourselves in a situation where sometimes a legal issue should be reviewed by the Court but there wasn't a suitable person to bring it to the Court. The Court Examiner put that old power of the Attorney General in a new position, which allowed for lots of past cases that were overdue for review to be reviewed.
I think the current system is doing its job better than the old system, and it's here to stay.
