Publication Honors Courageous Lebanese Judges

With support from a MEPI small grant, a local NGO in Lebanon is helping raise public awareness on courageous verdicts handed down by Lebanese judges.

The Lebanese Foundation for Permanent Civil Peace (LFPCP), as part of its Magistry Monitor project, recently published a book titled “Judicial Sentences as Norms to Advocate Democracy, Freedoms, and Human Rights.”  The publication builds on LFPCP’s continuing effort to encourage judges and others to make decisions based on the law rather than from the result of outside pressures or influences. 

The 500-page book includes more than 50 sentences rendered by Lebanese magistrates that LFPCP considers norms to advocate freedoms and human rights.  Sentences were divided into five subject ares: public freedoms, administrative submissions, social and economic rights, minors and delinquency, and judicial actions and practices.

In the chapter titled “Judicial Actions and Practices that Serve as a Norm,” the authors provide documents and analyses concerning protest movements conducted by judges, as well as plans for the creation of a department at the Council of State to speed up judicial procedures.

LFPCP hopes that law professors, faculty members, and legal students will use this and other books published by the group as judicial research references, while members of civil society will be mobilized to publicly recognize the courageous decisions and to denounce any punitive actions wrongly taken against these judges.

The MEPI-funded Lebanese Magistracy Monitor project aims at monitoring, analyzing, and spreading information on judicial sentences and practices to serve as norms for judges’ independence and moral courage.  This pioneering program was born from the awareness that honest, independent, and bold judges are frequently isolated and lack support from political powers, the institutional judicial corps, or the wider civil society.