The Rwandan government has changed its system for recuiting judges, ending the practice of requiring judicial candidates to pass specific recuitment exams. Instead, judges will now be political appointees. Under the lew legislation:
judges shall instead be appointed by the High Council of the Judiciary upon recommendation by the Bureau of the Judiciary.
They will be appointed based on their integrity, expertise and excellence they are known of in their career, and in their normal private life, other than gauging their capacity on their level of passing recruitment tests.
I don’t pretend to know enough about Rwanda’s political or judicial system to opine on the motivations for the change. But if a state that traditionally has employed a career judiciary –with testing and training up of young judges up front — suddenly moves to a system of politically appointing judges as a capstone to their legal careers, it’s certainly noteworthy.
The Interdependent Third Branch 