The judiciary is one of the three powers of the State whose mission is to administer justice through the application of laws and regulations in force. This power is exercised through judges and magistrates, where their decisions are only revoked by higher-level judicial bodies, which in practice means that the judiciary has the ability to impose its criteria on both the legislative and executive powers , thus , with their way of acting, carry out actions or promote laws that oppose others of a higher category.
Structure
The structure of the judiciary is different from country to country, but nevertheless they register at different levels, so that any decision taken by a court can be appealed to a higher court.
Evidently this hierarchy is part of a pyramid, a supreme court whose sentences are not appealable except for considering international law, in which case there is the possibility of resorting to supranational justice bodies.
Politicization of the judiciary
Although the judiciary is in theory an independent power of the legislature and the executive, on occasions, this independence may be compromised in function of the mechanism that each State appoints its judges and prosecutors. Thus, when political parties are responsible for nominating the members of the main legal bodies, it is not strange to be identified by ideologically related people.
Although this is not an impediment for the judicial bodies to carry out their functions in an absolutely impartial manner, in practice it has been proven that this is not always the case.
And even if one of the obligations of the judiciary is to control the excesses of executive power, less developed or less democratic countries tend to have problems, even if the judiciary is apparently independent and controlled by judges close to the government.
The true independence of the judiciary in relation to other powers is an effective thermometer of the level of freedom experienced by a society . Totalitarian and dictatorial regimes make use of the executive and legislative powers to submit to the judiciary, while in truly democratic countries this does not happen.
