The government of Petr Fiala announced after its meeting on Wednesday that the salaries of judges and prosecutors will only increase by 6.9 percent next year. So she wants to keep them at the level she proposed in the government’s austerity package. However, this intervention in judicial salaries was annulled by the Constitutional Court in May of this year. “The proposal completely denies the finding of the Constitutional Court and goes against it. It means a de facto salary freeze, the increase in judges’ salaries is half a percent,” said its president Libor Vávra at the Assembly of the Judges’ Union in Tábor.
Petr Fiala’s government will not raise the salaries of judges and prosecutors for next year, as it originally promised. “It is therefore only proposed to temporarily, for one year, leave the effective setting of the calculation of salary bases in the way that would result from Act No. 349/2020 Coll., the increase of all salary bases from January 1, 2025 will thus amount to 6.95 percent, ” states the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MPSV) in the submission report for the comment procedure.
In the original proposal from the beginning of October, the Ministry of Justice, in accordance with the May decision of the Constitutional Court, expected to return to the previous practice, when the salary of judges was calculated from three times the average salary for the previous year. The salary base for judges was supposed to amount to 129 thousand crowns. According to the current proposal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, it is 120 thousand crowns. A return to the calculation based on three times the average salary is expected only from 2026. According to the Union of Judges, salaries for judges will increase by only half a percent next year, not by the 6.9 percent promised by the government.
“I would like to congratulate the political representatives for trying to intervene in the salaries of judges in an unconstitutional way for the fourth time in three years. It’s a world record,” commented the government’s decision at the Assembly of the Judicial Union, its president Libor Vávra. According to Vávra, the government did not deal fairly with representatives of the judiciary regarding salary adjustments. At Tuesday’s meeting with the ministers of justice and labor and social affairs, no specific proposal was available, and the presidents of the highest courts were not invited to it either.
Vávra also criticized that politicians connect the salaries of judges with the salary of the judicial administration. “How much of the money we gave up in the past, when our salaries were repeatedly frozen, did they give to the administration of justice? Not a penny. At the same time, it was four billion,” said Vávra in his speech to the judges.
The salaries of constitutional officials will be the subject of an extraordinary meeting of the Chamber of Deputies, called by the opposition movement ANO. It proposes freezing the salaries of constitutional officials for the next five years.
