This is the first time that about 1100 judicial assistants, responsible for managing the administrative work of the judiciary, have stopped working definitively. This means a complete paralysis of the judiciary, making it impossible to file complaints, issue rulings, or even hold interrogation sessions and trials, or to transport detainees to the courts. The courthouses resemble the state of the country, whose foundations are crumbling little by little due to the economic crisis. A complete shutdown has struck the judicial system after judicial assistants announced yesterday their "final work stoppage without any exceptions until August 5," demanding better salaries. These assistants have proven the state wrong when it considered that correcting judges' salaries would solve the problem, affirming that they hold the keys to the "justice system" in their pockets, and that they can paralyze the entire judiciary.
This is the first time that the doors of public prosecutor offices and judges' clerks' rooms have been closed for more than two weeks, after they used to retreat for specific days weekly or declare strikes while managing urgent matters. It is also the first time that the judiciary has entered a real "coma" as the courthouses have literally turned into ghost towns, under the inability to issue judicial rulings for fear of them being nullified due to the absence of a clerk's signature. There is also no possibility of executing judicial decisions as there is no administrative follow-up, nor even the registration of complaints in the offices. The only exception is the presence of one or two staff members at the courthouse doors solely to process the last legal deadline for claims, which is only the last day of the deadline after paying the fee in cash according to a decision, so "it won't be said that we are denying people their rights by objecting to rulings within the legal deadlines, which we may also withdraw from if we see that the state denies our rights," according to one of the judicial assistants.
This first strike of its kind will not be the last, according to the judicial assistants, who believe that the state will not find a way out for them and will not repeat the mistake it made when it improved judges' salaries without considering other employees. They are fully aware that they will not receive their rights without correcting the salaries of all public sector employees, "which is unlikely under the current circumstances." This realization was solidified after the statement from caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati yesterday, that "meeting the demands all at once is impossible."
The stagnation that will strike the courts is not minor, considering there are over a thousand judicial assistants, including direct assistants, clerks, chief clerks, and office heads, distributed across the clerical offices, courts, and judicial departments, including criminal and civil courts and execution and real estate registries, in addition to staff in the Ministry of Justice. Their duties include registering and referring complaints, preparing and establishing case files, following up on notifications, including sending telegrams to security units to transport detainees to sessions, recording the statements of interrogated individuals and witnesses during questioning sessions before investigating judges or trials in the courtroom, mandatory signing of judicial decisions by clerks, registering requests from various types of companies in the commercial registry, following up on matters of provisional or executive enforcement in execution departments, following up on the collection of alimony in divorce rulings or the imprisonment of those refusing to pay, and monitoring travel restrictions or allowances... All of this means that the judiciary will be incapable of performing even the most basic emergency tasks for two weeks.
"The situation is alarming," say most judges who point out that the judicial authority is completely paralyzed after most judicial assistants adhered to their committees' decision, thus judges have become idle as they can no longer hold interrogation sessions, trials, or even follow up on transporting detainees or issuing rulings. They note that the execution departments, public prosecutor's offices, investigating judges, and real estate registries will be the most affected.
This is also the view of the President of the Beirut Bar Association, Nader Kassar, who believes that the strike "will not yield any results except harming the interests of people, especially the detainees and litigants, in addition to the interests of lawyers, especially since the state is intertwined with people's interests and state administrations," emphasizing that "it is unacceptable to halt the consideration of urgent cases." He expressed concern that the strike may be linked to the halting of the registration of lawsuits that various professions agreed to file against banks that have deposited their funds.
Judicial Assistants: These Are Our Demands
On the other hand, more than one judicial assistant, who refused to disclose their name, indicated that "we know that disrupting the judiciary is a major issue, and we refuse to bear the burden of this disruption or the fate of the detainees. But we have also raised our voices loudly more than once and threatened to escalate when we engaged in protest actions and then reduced our working hours until we reached a sit-in while managing urgent matters. However, the state did not heed our demands, and instead, it corrected the judges' salaries, while our salaries remained unchanged, ranging from one million two hundred thousand lira to three million lira for a small percentage of us, in addition to less than one million lira for transportation and about one additional salary every two months from the special fund," adding: "This salary is not even enough to cover monthly fuel expenses, considering that many live far from their workplaces."
They affirm that "this is the first time that most colleagues have committed to a comprehensive strike," noting that they are not afraid of its dissolution "given that the political authority is indifferent to our situation; however, the judges understand our demand and cannot threaten to refer some of us to judicial inspection, while some of them might request some assistants to manage urgent matters without affecting the overall movement."
Some judicial assistants point out that "our demand is not only for correcting our salaries and increasing transportation allowances equivalent to judges, but also for improving the social benefits that we lack due to not being received in hospitals or conducting tests in laboratories at the expense of the State Employee Cooperative, in addition to the absence of school aids." They indicate that "every time one of our colleagues suffers a health issue, we hold a collection to assist them," calling for "a judicial solidarity project that benefits a special fund for assistants, not for the judicial solidarity fund that benefits judges."
