In October 2023, the Supreme Court of Iceland (Hæstiréttur Íslands) delivered its judgment in Case 7/2023, Stilling hf. v þrotabúi Fashion Group ehf., in which an expert co-judge accepted payment for certain engineering calculations he made for the defendant during the course of the project, and therefore, when the case ended up before the courts, under these circumstances, the expert co-judge was therefore unfit to sit in the case.
The Supreme Court stated that under national law, as well as Article 6 ECHR, everyone has the right to have their rights and obligations resolved through a fair procedure before an independent and impartial court. Moreover, when assessing a judge’s ability to handle a case, it is necessary to consider that the purpose of the eligibility rules is not only to prevent a judge from judging a case if he is biased towards the parties, but also to ensure trust both the parties to a case and the public. It then stated that in line with national law, a judge must recuse himself if there is a reason for disqualification, even if the litigant does not have a claim for it.
In the case at hand, whilst the Supreme Court ruled that the recusal was not based on a specific legal provision in national law, there are ‘other events or circumstances’ that are apt to ‘justifiably question…[the]…impartiality’ of the expert co-judge. The Supreme Court therefore concluded that in the case at hand, given the expert co-judge accepted payment for certain engineering calculations he made for the defendant during the course of the project, the same expert co-judge was therefore unfit to sit in the case.
Given this, the Supreme Court vacated the underlying judgment of the District Court, and returned the case to the District Court, to be adjudicated by other member(s) of the judiciary.
The judgment of the Supreme Court of Iceland (Hæstiréttur Íslands) in Case 7/2023, Stilling hf. v þrotabúi Fashion Group ehf., can be read here.