Mexico is poised to amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected as part of a judicial overhaul championed by the outgoing president but slammed by critics as a blow to the country’s rule of law.
All it takes is getting a few panel members with an ideological axe to grind and suddenly the selection process for judges and the JAC panel itself becomes politicized in that particular direction.
But furthermore, the very framework of law is political. You can't actually non-politically adjudicate disputes or reviews or appointments or dismissals, there are always political underpinnings and ideological assumptions embedded within the process. The very fact that they currently "particularly welcome applications from ethnic minority candidates and Welsh speakers" is political, and acknowledges that it is political and ideological and not truly objective.
An attempt to be representative is not equal to being "political".
It's actually a strength of the system that minorities get some representation rather than being always voted into zero representatives. And they still have to pass the standards to be considered as experts in the field.
No system is perfect, but look at America. Small area elections for judges produce poor corrupt picks. Large area elections produce partisan fights with extremists campaigning against each other.
There's no country which is a good advert for directly electing judges.
Well if that's the meaning of "political you're using then all judges are. That's why I put it in quotes in my last reply, I assumed you meant partisan. Otherwise you'd have been making an irrelevant point.
Unfortunately the US has a storied history of elected local judges allowing lynchings, for example, while the appointed federal courts passed civil rights so I won't be taking notes.
Of course the appointed judges and elected judges are now targeting women and minorities. So your appointment system is also broken.
The problematic politics of elected judges in the US come from its fucked electoral system. US elections, for most of its history, were undemocratic at their core... and they still aren't very democratic tbh
But the worst judges, today, are appointed.
Your conception of politics being only partisan is very narrow; partisanship in liberal democracy is mostly just kayfabe.
Asking millions of unqualified people to pick an expert and professional will not be as successful as an unbiased selection committee.
Not every problem is solvable with a popularity contest.
As long as a committee has democratic oversight democracy can still fix any problems as you wish. But it's much more efficient and successful most of the time.
But by that logic there's no reason to ask millions of unqualified people to pick an expert and professional legislator.
You're creating an arbitrary professional difference between creation of legislation and interpretation of legislation, but that's ideological. When it comes down to it, by your logic, legislators should be chosen by an unbiased selection committee. That's where your antidemocratic logic leads.
Okay, and I'm responding to how a bad system actually works in the real world in my country. The lack of democratic input and oversight of the Judiciary in the US is the problem. US judges have always been bad because they were either appointed to undermine democracy or elected by undemocratic means. The problem has never been democracy.