Judge Paine shares thoughts from first-hand visit to Croatian judiciary

Email | Print By David A. Fox

10-01-2003 12:00 AM — Federal Bankruptcy Court Judge George Paine recently returned from a 10-week trip to Croatia, where he learned about and consulted on the former communist country's judicial system. He spoke Tuesday night at the offices of The Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee at 300 Deaderick.

Some 12 years after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia, its court system remains plagued by numerous shortcomings – interference from the executive branch, inadequate laws and law schools, outdated forms.

"Within this context, what the judges there are doing is heroic," Paine said. "But the system needs a good nudge to be a real court."

The judge and his wife, Ophelia Paine, prepared for the trip in part by taking nine Croatian language classes from the Tennessee Foreign Language Institute. Once in country, he was taken under the wing of Croatian Supreme Court Judge Ivo Grbin. After five weeks visiting courts across the country, Paine settled in Zagreb, where the bulk of the country's judicial system resides.

In his comments to the 75 or so people gathered last night at the Legal Aid Society, which provides legal services to low income, elderly and abused people, Paine listed the most serious shortcomings of the Croatian civil court system:

* The Ministry of Justice, part of the executive branch, dominates the judiciary.

* The laws governing the country's commerce are inadequate and there are extremely few experts on commercial law and civil procedure.

* The bankruptcy system was adopted from Germany, which had discarded it as totally inadequate.

* Court forms date back to the mid-1950s and aren't useful today.

* The lawyers are ill-trained because the law schools are poor. The schools maintain a lecture-style approach, with the result being that their graduates can recite the law but typically are at a loss in applying or understanding it.

* There is no continuing judicial education program.

* There is next to no administrative support for judges, who oftentimes have to bring in their own computers.

* The courts conduct a "search for the truth," rather than applying rules of evidence and placing the burden on the parties to prove their civil cases.

* Lawyers tend to be paid by the number of hearings – not surprisingly, commercial cases there involve countless hearings, which chokes the system.

Paine, who has made earlier trips to Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Russia and Rumania, hopes Croatian legal officials will visit the U.S. to make comparisons for themselves. While he said the people he met with were receptive to his ideas, the country has been beset with foreign experts preaching their own ways, which is making Croatians increasingly resistant to outside influence.

Paine's visit to Legal Aid follows by one month Judge Gil Merritt's visit there to talk about his experiences in Iraq. An article about his experience in Iraq appears in this month's Tennessee Bar Journal.