The Court of First Instance of the Kentron and Nork-Marash Communities of Yerevan is more than 5,700,000 drams (about $11,500) in debt for electricity, and now the executive director of the Electricity Supply Network, CJSC, Yevgeny Gladunchik, has been instructed to cut off their power. The debt has accumulated since 1999, and keeps growing, since the court has never been allocated enough money in the budget to cover its annual electricity bill. The court was given 1,184,000 drams for electricity in 2004, but the bill for the three winter months alone amounted to 1,300,000 drams.

The Kentron and Nork-Marash court also owes money to Armentel, and has signed an agreement promising to pay off the debt by December 2005. "Last May we began collecting money from our judges to pay the telephone debt, and the government allocated about 300,000 drams, but we still owe 2,500,000 for long distance calls," we were informed by the court. The service fee alone for the court nineteen telephone lines comes to 741,000 drams a year. But according to court employees, long distance calls and per minute charges were not included in the budget, and even service fees were not calculated in full. For the court, these are unavoidable expenses.

Judges have to run their own chambers, which means taking care of office and communal expenses, including secretaries and assistants. In addition they have to provide for the uninterrupted functioning of their computers, for paper, cartridges, postal expenses, and so on. Court employees calculate that each judge mails 300 subpoenas a month, which costs 43,000 drams. The postal expenses of nine judges of the court of the Kentron and Nork-Marash communities come to 4.5 million drams a year; these expenditures are not budgeted, but they are made.

This is customary, since the courts draw up their budgets not according to their actual expenditures, but within limits specified by the ministry of finance and economy. Judges say that only wages are specified correctly; other expenses are not provided for, with the assumption that the chairmen of the courts are responsible for running the courts.

From time to time, judges break the unwritten rules. Last summer the telephones of the Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation of Armenia were shut off for a long time, and the courts were in no hurry to pay off their debts. The Court of Cassation owes Armentel 1,757,000 drams; the Court of Appeal for Civil Cases owes 52,700.

The government was compelled to reexamine its budgetary policy toward the courts in the middle of the fiscal year. In Decision # 1204-A of September 2, 2004, the government allocated to the courts 5.5 million drams from its reserves to pay for their communications expenses. Four courts of first instance of Yerevan - those of the Erebuni and Nubarashen, Kentron and Nork-Marash, Achapniak and Dadidashen, and Avan and Nor Nork communities, and five courts in the marzes - in Ararat, Armavir, Kotayk, Vayots Dzor, and Tavush, paid their telephone bills.

This doesn't mean that the budgetary requirements of other courts which have not accumulated debts have been met. Most courts face a similar situation; the only difference is that some court chairmen try to take care of their problems before huge debts accumulate. There are two main methods of doing so-the judges undertake to find the money themselves, or they cooperate with representatives of the electricity supply network, the telephone company and other organizations. Both methods are unacceptable, since the inability of the state to provide for the court budget in full encourages judges to take bribes or make tradeoffs in collaboration with outside organizations. This is a customary modus operandi, and the authors of the budget who fail to provide the necessary funds are in fact accepting it as natural. "This is exactly what they have in mind," say judges, who see no other explanation for why the government fails to perform simple arithmetical calculations when it draws up their budgets.

According to Gohar Harutiunyan, chief accountant of the Court of Cassation, the courts' annual budgets for 2005 have been calculated based on actual expenditures. In the budget for 2005, she insists, the expenditures for building maintenance, postal services, electricity, telephone (both service charges and long distance calls) are specified for all the courts. She says the amounts provided for should be satisfactory since financial allocations increased. In previous years not enough money was allocated for communications-long distance calls were not envisaged and postal expenditures were very small-but expenditures in the 2005 budget are based on actual calculations.

If the problem of postal expenses can be considered solved in the 2005 budget, the same cannot be said of other municipal expenses. "The requirements presented by the courts are mainly met; only expenditures for office maintenance and utilities remain insufficient," Harutiunyan says. In other words, the acquisition of office supplies and other necessities will again remain the responsibility of the judges. In order to give the reader an idea of these amounts, let's take the example of the court of first instance of the Avan and Nor Nork communities of Yerevan. For office supplies alone, the court has requested 2.5 million drams.

The amounts envisaged in the budget will perhaps satisfy courts located in old dilapidated buildings that don't require particular spending for maintenance. But there are also newly-erected court buildings constructed in accordance with international standards, whose maintenance requires large amounts of money. Only the chairman of each given court knows how the buildings will be maintained under the current budget. So far only the Courts of First Instance of the Malatia-Sebastia and Avan and Nor-Nork Communities are in new buildings. The Courts of Appeal will move into a new building in January, the Economic Court and the court of first instance of the Shirak Marz in May, and the Court of First Instance of the Kentron and Nork-Marash Communities in the fall of 2005.

Unlike the other branches of government, such as the legislature, the courts not only spend money but also enrich the state budget. The courts transferred 641,936,000 drams to the state budget in 2003, and another 473,177,300 drams in the first half of 2004. The Court of First Instance of the Kentron and Nork-Marash Communities alone has transferred to the budget 25,500,000 drams in costs for civil cases. The fines imposed for criminal cases amount to more than 5 million drams.

The draft budgets for the courts show that the executive branch has no intention of securing the independence of the courts or preventing bribery, since it obliges the courts in writing to fill the budget deficit.