Judges are among the senior public servants whose pay is compared to their international colleagues in a report to Government, writes CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor
ONE OF the many contentious documents on the desk of the Minister for Justice is the report from the Review Group on Higher Remuneration in the Public Service.
This deals with personnel at the top levels of the public service: Government Ministers, secretaries general of departments, senior executives in public bodies and local authorities and judges. For the first time, the review group was asked to look at international comparisons.
When it comes to looking at the judiciary, the group will have the benefit of a report already prepared by a Council of Europe body, the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), which reported in 2008, using data from 47 states collected in 2006. This found Irish judges to be among the best paid in Europe, with only the UK judges earning higher salaries.
The report gives the basic salaries of judges at the beginning of their careers, along with that of a judge of the highest court. According to the 2006 figures, the starting salary for an Irish judge was €127,664, and that of a Supreme Court judge €222,498. The most recent figures are €147,000 for a District Court judge and €295,000 for the Chief Justice, but no comparable up-to-date European figures exist.
In Scotland the 2006 figures were €170,000 as a starting salary and €255,000 for a Supreme Court judge, while in Northern Ireland the figures were €140,000 and €288,905 respectively – the latter higher by about €50,000 than England and Wales.
In contrast, in France the starting salary for a judge was €35,777 and a Supreme Court judge earned €105,317. In Germany the figures were €38,829 and €86,478, in Belgium €56,487 and €122,196 and in Spain €45,230 and €115,498.
A more revealing figure was the ratio between judges’ earnings and the average salary in the economy. In Northern Ireland a judge at the beginning of his or her career earned 5.8 times the average salary, rising to 11.9 times at the highest court level. In Ireland the respective multiples were 4.1 and 7.2. In France and Germany the starting salary of a judge were 0.9 and 1.2 times the average respectively, rising to 3.5 and 2.1 respectively at the apex of his or her career.
However, it should be pointed out that judges in the common law system, which operates in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales and Northern Ireland, are differently recruited and do a different job to those in the civil law system that operates in most European countries.
This is most dramatically illustrated by other statistics in the CEPEJ report, which shows that Ireland has the lowest proportion of judges to population of any of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe. There are 3.1 judges for every 100,000 inhabitants in Ireland, compared with 11.9 in France, 24.5 in Germany, 14.9 in Belgium and 10.1 in Spain.
In the common law jurisdictions the proportions are 4.4 per 100,000 in Scotland and seven in England and Wales, with only Northern Ireland showing a similar proportion to the civil law countries, with 21.3 judges per 100,000 inhabitants.
These differences between the civil and common law countries are explained by the different roles played by judges and the different manner of their recruitment. A judge is a separate career path in the legal system in most European countries, with people opting to join the judiciary on leaving university after a specialist training. They join at the bottom rung of the ladder, usually in their 20s.
In most European countries, where juries are less a part of the system, judges sit in panels. Therefore, depending on the level of the court, it may consist of three, five or more judges. This obviously creates a need for a greater number of judges.
In contrast, in Ireland a judge is recruited from the ranks of experienced lawyers in mid-career, and sits alone or with a jury, apart from in the Supreme Court. He or she is solely responsible for the legal guidance of the case and, except where there is a jury, for the decision and/or written judgment.
Indeed, the CEPEJ report itself warns: “ data . . . must be taken with caution . . . A ‘new’ judge in countries of common law is a legal professional who benefits from a long working experience and then naturally benefits from a high salary (€100,000), which is not easy to be compared with junior judges in other countries.”