Functions of the Government Council

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From Law 82 of the popular courts

CHAPTER II
SUPREME POPULAR COURT
SECTION ONE
General disposition

ARTICLE 15.-1. The Supreme People's Court exercises the highest judicial authority and its decisions in this order are final.

2.- Through its Governing Council, it exercises the legislative initiative in matters relating to the administration of justice and regulatory power; it makes decisions and dictates general norms of obligatory compliance by all the courts and, on the base of the experience of these; provides mandatory instructions to establish a uniform judicial practice in the interpretation and application of the law

FOURTH SECTION
Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court

ARTICLE 18.-1. - The Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court is composed of the President of the Court, who presides over it, the Vice-Presidents and the President of each of the Chambers.

2.- At the meetings of the Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court, the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General of the Republic are invited, who participate with voice but without vote.

3.- Likewise, meetings of the Governing Council, other state and government authorities may be invited, when, due to the matter to be treated, it is of interest to these authorities. If they attend, they can participate with voice, but without vote.

ARTICLE 19.-1. It corresponds to the Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court:

a) transmit to the courts the general instructions received from the Council of State;
b) to decide, at the request of the National Assembly of Popular Power or the Council of State, on decrees and other general provisions;
c) exercise the legislative initiative in matters related to the administration of justice;
d) know, evaluate and approve the draft reports of accountability of the People's Supreme Court to the National Assembly of People's Power;
e) examine and evaluate the judicial practice of its own rooms and other courts;
f) exercise control and supervision of the jurisdictional activity of all courts;
g) to evacuate the general consultations made by its own rooms, the courts, the Attorney General of the Republic and the Minister of Justice;
h) provide general instructions of a mandatory nature for the courts, in order to establish a uniform judicial practice in the interpretation and application of the law;
i) request from the State Council, when necessary, the general and mandatory interpretation of a current law;
j) resolve the competition issues that arise due to the matter between the courts;
k) resolve conflicts of powers that arise between the Central State Administration agencies and the courts;
l) evaluate and approve the proposals to the National Assembly of Popular Power, for the election of the professional judges of the Supreme People's Court;
m) know and approve the proposals of candidates of professional judges of the provincial and municipal popular courts, which are raised by the Government Councils of the popular provincial courts;
n) organize the System of Professional Improvement of the judges of the popular courts, according to the needs of each instance; and approve the respective plans;
o) organize the technical training of the auxiliary and administrative personnel of the People's Courts; and approve the respective plans;
p) organize, direct and control the application of the "Work System with the State Tables and its Reserve" in relation to the personnel of the popular courts;
q) decide the structures and templates of jurisdictional positions and auxiliary personnel of the popular courts;
r) approve the creation of sections of the rooms of the People's Supreme Court to hear about specialized matters or when the needs of the service so require;
s) approve the creation or suppression of popular courts and their rooms or sections;
t) determine the order in which the Vice Presidents of the People's Supreme Court replace the President of said Court, in cases of temporary absence or impediment thereof;
u) determine in the order that the Presidents of the Chamber of the People's Supreme Court replace the President and Vice President of said Court, in cases of temporary absence or simultaneous impediment thereof, or the Vice-Presidents, when appropriate;
v) determine the order in which the professional judges of each room replace the President of the same, in cases of temporary absence or impediment;
w) agree on the Regulations of the 'Popular Courts;
x) approve the calls for contests of opposition or merits for income or promotions in the Popular Courts System;

y) approve the proposals to the Council of State for the granting to judges and other workers of the popular courts, of decorations and honorary titles;
z) approve the draft budget and the material technical plan in all its categories, of the popular courts.

2- The Government Council, for the purposes of the provisions of subsections e), f) and h) of the previous section, may:

a) request a report from the Presidents of the rooms of the People's Supreme Court;
b) request to the Presidents of the provincial and municipal popular courts, reports regarding the judicial practice of their respective courts;
c) convene the Presidents of the Chamber of the People's Supreme Court and the Presidents of the provincial and municipal popular courts.

Government Council Secretariat

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For the dispatch of matters, the People's Supreme Court has a judicial secretary who, in turn, is a member of the Governing Council and is in charge of the Court's Secretariat.
On the other hand, in each room there is a judicial secretariat, composed of technical and auxiliary personnel directed by a judicial secretary.

Members of the governing council

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Open doors

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Judicial Training School

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Created by Agreement 325 of October 29, 2002 of the Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court, with the aim of providing the Cuban judicial system with its own training center for the articulation of pedagogical and scientifically updated training modalities, aimed at resolving the institutional needs The formative design of the Popular Courts System also has two territorial sub-branches in the provinces of Cienfuegos and Holguín, which allow multiplying the indexes of graduates and replication processes, by increasing the number of graduates. These are subordinate to the popular provincial courts and tax information to the school who, in turn, guides and directs them from a methodological point of view based on a National Strategy for the Preparation of Tables, Reserves, Judges and Workers, legitimized by the Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court, which is designed based on the results of supervisory visits, the deficiencies identified in the analysis of appeals and appeals and the failures detected in the performance evaluation process. The Judicial Training School has had increasing participation in the Ibero-American Network of Judicial Schools, as a way to enable its insertion with the formative schemes of this region and incorporate its experiences.

Jurisdiction and Competencies

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The jurisdictional powers and powers of the People's Supreme Court reside in the courtrooms, which exercise their jurisdiction in the national territory and are competent to know, in accordance with the provisions of the procedural laws of the various matters, of the Appeal resources and Cassation against the sentences issued by the popular provincial courts and territorial military courts, and the Review procedure; The Military Chamber is aware of the Judicial Inspection procedure provided for in the Military Criminal Procedure Law.
The Chambers of the criminal matter, judge, in the first instance, the cases in which it is established in the current procedural laws, and to find out the remedies that are brought against these sentences, a Special Chamber is constituted composed of the President of the Court Supreme People, two presidents of the courtroom, two professional judges and two laymen of any Chamber.
The plenary of the judges of the People's Supreme Court only has jurisdictional functions, when it is constituted in the Chamber of Justice for the purpose of judging, among others, the president, vice president and secretary of the National Assembly of Popular Power; to the members of the Councils of State and of Ministers, to the president, vice-president, professional and lay judges of the People's Supreme Court, and to the Attorney General of the Republic, their deputy prosecutors and other prosecutors of the Attorney General's Office.
The collegiate direction of the Court System is exercised by the Governing Council of the People's Supreme Court, an organ established by the Constitution of the Republic to which it also assigns the legislative initiative and the regulatory power. This body provides general instructions to establish a uniform judicial practice in the interpretation and application of the law.
Among its main functions are to decide, at the request of the National Assembly or the Council of State, on the constitutionality of laws, decree laws and other general provisions; to exercise the legislative initiative in the administration of justice, and to evacuate the general consultations that may be formulated by its own courtrooms, the courts, the Attorney General of the Republic or the Minister of Justice.
The Governing Council is in charge of evaluating and approving the candidates that are presented to the National Assembly of the Popular Power for their election as judges of the People's Supreme Court, and to know and approve the corresponding candidates to the provincial and municipal courts; In addition, to convene opposition exercises or merit contests for the entry or promotion of judges, and organize the system of professional improvement of both judges and auxiliary staff through the Judicial Training School. Likewise, the Governing Council supervises the jurisdictional activity of the courts and approves the budget proposals for the entire Court System.

Judicial Ethics

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Importance of social interest and rationality in judicial decisions
March 20, 2017 27 readings

Author: Governing Council of the Supreme People's Court of the Republic of Cuba

For Cuban judges, administering justice is a complex, exciting and transcendent task. To the particularly controversial nature of the jurisdictional activity itself, we add, in our case, the responsibility involved in doing so in the context of a society in which citizens know their rights and have a broad sense of right and right, as a direct consequence of the work of the Revolution.

The first paragraph of Article 120 of our Constitution establishes with clear clarity that "the function of imparting justice comes from the people and is exercised in the name of the latter by the People's Supreme Court and the other Courts that the Law establishes," thus defining the character essentially popular that has in our country the jurisdictional function.

For that constitutional postulate to reach full force, it is absolutely necessary that the men and women to whom the honorable mission of administering justice have been entrusted, constantly reflect on what this popular essence of our administration of justice means, as well as on the means and modes to specify it in each and every one of the judicial acts in which we participate, since as we well know the general only manifests itself in and through the particular.

It is necessary to understand that the aforementioned popular character of justice in Cuba cannot be assumed in any way as something abstract whose manifestation is limited only to the generally humble and proletarian origin of those who integrate the Courts, either as professional judges or as lay judges; or to the unquestionably democratic mechanisms by which we are chosen for the performance of these functions. Ultimately, what defines such a condition is the way in which the judicial processes and the decisions adopted in them contain and reflect in itself the focus, perspectives and point of view of the people, which is equivalent to saying that in the judicial action the social interest prevails.

Does the above mean a denial of the rule of law when elucidating judicial conflicts? Could it be said that by attending to the social interest, as a necessary reference in their performance, the judges would be losing the independence that should be inherent to the performance of their functions and that it also constitutes a constitutional imperative? Is the social interest necessarily contrasted with the individual interests to which judicial activity must also offer legal protection?

We will surely agree to answer these questions by stating that far from contradiction between the aforementioned aspects of the judicial task, what is evident is the necessary and close interrelation that must be established between them and the way they complement each other.

It is clear that when a judicial process is aired, the task of the judges is to apply the procedural and substantive norms in force to the particular case and make it free from influences outside their own conscience and the criteria that, personally and according to the Law, have been formed in relation to the matter. But the task of applying the Law to the specific case always goes, inexorably, through a process of interpretation that is characterized by a thorough analysis of the facts that are prosecuted and the elements inherent in the norm that is intended to be adapted, to determine if indeed there is correspondence between each other and, where appropriate, make use of the judicial discretion established in the corresponding regulatory provision.

It is in this process of formation of conviction, analysis, interpretation and decision-making, that Cuban judges must always keep in mind that we do not act in a personal capacity but by the mandate of society, that is, of the people who have given us the task to judge and decide on your behalf; and that mandate will only be fully fulfilled if we act in accordance with the values ​​of the people, their idiosyncrasy, their intelligence, their integrity and their sensitivity.

Following that same reflection, it must be said that when a judge acts superficially, he is not fulfilling the mandate of the people because our people do not act lightly; when a judge acts with lack of sensitivity, when he acts with lack of firmness, when he acts with naivety or when he acts schematically, he is not fulfilling the mandate of the people, because our people neither suffer nor tolerate those inadequacies. How to explain then that sometimes some judges make these mistakes?

Our Judicial System, among other virtues, has the characteristic that the Courts function collectively in all matters and in all instances. That puts us in better conditions so that our actions are always consistent with what society expects of us, since the exchange of criteria and points of view and the adoption of collective and consensual decisions leave less room for error and narrowness in the analysis. Hence, it constitutes an imperative to improve our performance, extract the maximum potential to the collegial analysis of judicial decisions.

Special mention deserves the issue of rationality that we should print the judges to each and every one of our pronouncements. The daily work of the judge is to assess the options that are permanently raised by the matter being examined and select which of them is the most appropriate and correct. These are sometimes simpler and more complex decisions but they will always imply consequences for people directly involved in the matter and for others that are not.

In this constant process of decision-making is where common sense, the power of reasoning, intelligence and sensibility of judges are also permanently tested. That is where we need to be alert to dangers and threats that permanently lurk the intellectual capacity of those who deliver justice. Routine, superficiality, demotivation and undervaluation permanently ambush the good performance of the judicial function and unfortunately, sometimes, lacerate or kill the result of our work.

Each judicial decision of ours must be characterized, in addition to its legal support, its transparency, its level of weighting, its wisdom and for combining as particular as possible the particular interests with the social interests. The right sense of our laws and other legal provisions, in their correct interpretation and application, should not and can never lead us to make absurd, irrational decisions or that injure the general interests of the population. When a decision of this type is taken, it is not due to insufficiency of the Law, but due to insufficiency of the judges.

How can we solve such sacred things as the freedom of the people, the tranquility of the citizens, the heritage, the rights to housing, labor rights, etc., without feeling on our shoulders the weight of the immense responsibility that our decisions about it? What can justify that we do not always mobilize all our ability to reason, common sense and human and political sensitivity in each issue to be resolved or decided on the issues in which we intervene?

Acting in a logical, reasonable and consistent manner in delivering justice in our country is not only a matter of necessity and genuine aspiration, but it is also the only legitimate way to act; taking into account that, in general, our main legal provisions, both in the substantive and procedural order, establish the guidelines for justice to proceed in that way. The validity of principles such as the free appreciation of the evidence, the search for material truth, motivation of the sentences, broad judicial discretion and the adjustment and individualization of the Sanction, among others that inform our legal system, give legal support to the most broad rationality in our administration of justice.

José Martí, with the proverbial capacity he had to penetrate the essence of the phenomena, expressing his appreciation of how the judicial function should function, said: "It is true that judges have a duty to adhere to the Law, but not to subserviently because then they would not be judges but servants. They do not sit in that position to manipulate their intelligence, but to work just, but free. They have a duty to hear the legal precept, but they also have the power to interpret it. "

Judicial Ethics

Quality of Judicial Service

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The function of imparting justice, conferred on the Popular Courts System, is oriented to the satisfaction of the justiciables and other intervenors in the judicial processes, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution and the laws, which forces to strengthen the conception of quality management and to permanently review the supervision and control mechanisms.
The quality management allows the improvement of the organization, structure and operation of the courts, to guarantee jurisdictional activity. The internalization of the culture of quality in the Popular Courts System, awareness of the internal and external environment, risk prevention and constant learning, are budgets for the fulfillment of the institutional mission, which guarantees the confidence of the population in the work of the courts.
Quality is managed from the combination of key actions: planning, doing, verifying and acting for improvement, in correspondence with national and international standards, which seek to standardize good practices, internal procedures and verification parameters of judicial activity, through research, development and innovation.
The values ​​that support and guarantee effective judicial protection are expressed in diligent performance in the processing of processes and in the adoption of judicial decisions; transparency, respect and strict compliance with the guarantees and rights of the parties and of all parties involved in judicial matters; the adoption of correct, understandable, duly substantiated and legally argued decisions, characterized by their rationality and sense of fairness; effective and timely compliance with firm judicial decisions; and the ethical behavior of judges, judicial secretaries and other workers in the performance of their duties and in their personal and family life.

Judges

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The professional and lay judges of the superior Cuban justice body are elected by the National Assembly of Popular Power. In the case of professional judges, the proposed candidacy is previously approved by the Governing Council of said court and its election is not subject to termination. In relation to lay judges, the nomination proposal corresponds to a commission that presides over the Central of Workers of Cuba and is also made up of the rest of the mass and social organizations of the country; his election is for a term of five years, and his re-election carries the same procedure.

Work with us

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Working Hours of the Popular Courts System

Monday to Thursday: 8:00 am to 5:30 pm

Friday: 8:00 am to 4:30 pm

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