Courts to be separated

By KARO JESSE
CHIEF Justice Sir Gibbs Salika has announced plans to separate the running of the National Court and Supreme Court.
“Currently, the judges are both Supreme Court and National Court judges. We want that to stop,” he said.
He wants judges to be appointed either as a Supreme Court judge or National Court judge.
“We will need the support of the Government through Parliament to make the changes to the Constitution to separate the Supreme Court from National Court,” he said.
He opened the 2021 Legal Year with a service at the Koki Seventh-day Adventist church in Port Moresby.
Sir Gibbs explained that the separation of the two courts would allow judges to specialise in either court.
“At present, all judges are judges of the Supreme Court and the National Court. (The) change is so that judges are appointed to only one court and not two courts,” he said.
“Once that is done, we will be guided by the volume of work to consider whether it is necessary to have the separate court of appeal.”
He said while there were plans to make justice accessible to everyone, he urged fellow judges to minimise the adjournment of cases to cut down on the backlog.
It was the chief justice’s promise in 2018 to reduce the backlog of cases in the court system and reduce the long list of reserved decisions by judges