Judicial Integrity through the Lens of Modern Social Transformations

Abstract

The most important factors of building and maintaining public confidence in the judiciary are extralegal social factors are of great for. The active development of a postmodern society poses new challenges, one of them is the "post-truth" phenomenon, that gives rise to the circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. This leads to a peculiar interpretation of the facts on social media, which doesn’t always represent the facts, but may contains their selective and non-exhaustive interpretation. Therefore, the whole traditional value system got under blow,since facts doesn’t occupy a leading position in Western democracies. The issue of spreading the post-truth in the judicial sphere, adversely affects public legal awareness and confidence in the judiciary,particularly, inciting hatred and misinformation in the media results in putting pressure on judges.Because ofthe social context and new conditions of a postmodern society, the judicial authorities and every judge nowadays must be prepared for the possible challenges related to such an environment. It seems,trere are two types of these challenges : the ones related to the integrity of the judges and those related to communication with representatives of civil society. Today integrityis associated, above all, with the virtues of the judge and the standards of ethical conduct for judges.The judge's ethical standards are enshrined in Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct and reflected in the Code of Judicial Ethics, which state that the exercise of the right of everyone to judicial protection sets high demands on the moral qualities of each judge. It seems that the judicial integrity may be regarded as a result of implementing ethical standards and principles in each judge's behaviour. Civil society's demand is high in terms of the judicial integrity, and it is particularly exacerbated in transitional democracies, during a period of active reformation processes, when many issues may be shifted from the political plane to the plane of judgement. Moreover, there is not enough today for a judge to be virtuous, because society demands openness of the court procedures, and therefore the problem of judicial communication is raised. As we can see, judicial authorities and judges are aware of the communication importance and are willing to communicate with civil society, in particular, most courts in Ukraine have developed communication strategies; active participation of courts and judges on social networking is in evidence. Keywords: post-truth, court, integrity, professional ethics of judges, judicial communication.