Supreme Court Chairman says terms for investigation of criminal cases in Latvia are very good

The terms within which criminal cases are usually reviewed in Latvia are very good, said the Chairman of the Supreme Court of Justice Aigars Strupišs in an interview to LTV programme Rīta panorāma.
He explained that the average term for criminal cases is 7.9 months in the first instance and 4.2 months in the second instance. “Most criminal cases are reviewed in the course of a year. This is an average index,” explained Strupišs.
Strupišs said these indexes are not just good in Latvia’s context but also in comparison to other countries.
The average expected case review term in the Supreme Court for civil cases this year is 18 months. For criminal cases it is ten months. For administrative cases it is 24 months, as previously reported by the Council of Justice.
When deciding on case review terms for this year, both planned and actual case review terms and other influencing factors from the previous year were taken into account.
The Department of Civil Affairs and the Department of Criminal Affairs had such a deadline for hearing cases also scheduled for last year, but the actual execution was lower – 17 for the Department of Civil Affairs, 9.2 months for the Department of Criminal Cases. The Department of Administrative Affairs, on the other hand, was scheduled to hear cases in an average of 18 months last year, but was actually 32.1 months.
The average length of proceedings in the Department of Administrative Cases was affected by the suspension of proceedings in cases in which the department referred questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for a preliminary ruling. Last year, more than 45 cases were closed in which proceedings were suspended due to referrals to the CJEU.
So many suspended cases are not planned this year, but every preliminary question to the CJEU, as well as the application to the Constitutional Court, suspends the hearing of the case at the AT and extends the total time for hearing the case.
At the meeting of the Council of Justice, concerns were raised that two years for cassation proceedings and 1.5 years for civil cases is too long from the point of view of the parties.
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