Judicial Impartiality in Civil Proceedings: Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights and Selected Cases of the Supreme Court

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of judicial impartiality in civil procedure, which is relevant from theoretical and practical perspectives. The purpose of the article is to highlight the main approaches to judicial impartiality as an integral part of the right to a fair trial in terms of the paragraph 1Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, as well as to analyze the Supreme Court's practice for compliance with the approaches to the interpretation of judicial impartiality developed in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. In the article the author uses general philosophical, general scientific and special research methods, in particular, dialectical, system-structural, logical and comparative legal methods, method of analysis and synthesis. The judicial impartiality is an integral element of the rule of law and the right to a fair trial. The European Convention on Human Rights and the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights played a key role in the development of international standards of judicial impartiality within the European region. The European Court of Human Rights developed a dual approach to judicial impartiality, distinguishing between subjective and objective impartiality. An additional approach to verifying the impartiality of the court in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights is to distinguish between functional and personal impartiality. The analysis of the Supreme Court practice shows that the latter has not fully accepted the approaches to judicial impartiality developed by the of the European Court of Human Rights. The article analyzes certain cases of the Supreme Court, in which, in the author's opinion, the Supreme Court incorrectly applied the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in order to motivate its decisions. In addition, special attention is paid to the problem of the possibility of judicial disqualification on the grounds of the performance/non-performance of certain procedural powers by a judge. The article can be interesting for legal scholars and practitioners, PhD students and students of law universities.