The institution meant to educate future judges and prosecutors - the guardians of justice - did not follow the rules itself. The State Audit Office uncovered a string of suspicious payments and irregularities at the Academy for Judges and Public Prosecutors for 2024.

The auditors established that the Academy paid fees to coordinators „whose status, rights and obligations are not defined by the Law on the Academy". In other words - people paid for a role the law does not even provide for. Similarly, members of boards and programme councils received a full monthly fee regardless of whether they attended the sessions at all.

One figure in the procurement is especially telling: from 2011 to 2023 the same economic operator was used continuously - 13 years without competition, through negotiated procedures without publication. The tender documentation also contained criteria unrelated to the subject of the procurement, and part of the goods and services was bought with no public procurement at all.

The chaos does not stop there. The second phase of training for the eighth generation exceeded the legal deadline by three months, which brought additional payments for mentors and coordinators. And the enrolment of 130 trainees - first halted by the Anti-Corruption Commission, then blocked by the government, and finally entirely annulled in December 2025. An entire generation of future lawyers, and the money invested in them, left stuck.

Former director Nataša Gaber-Damjanovska attributed the findings to objective circumstances and an intense workload, not to deliberate circumvention of the law. Perhaps. But the question for the citizen stays uncomfortable: if the institution that creates the guardians of the law plays so casually with its own rules, with what respect for the rules do its graduates come out?