MOSCOW, May 19 (RAPSI) - About 30% of the Supreme Court’s Criminal Panel is vacant. The system is lacking judges meeting necessary requirements, Vedomosti newspaper reports Monday. The unsuccessful candidates are mostly being rejected due to family members who also work in law.

The qualification board has basically finished the selection of candidates for the judicial panel on criminal cases in the integrated Supreme Court. For the 60 available seats, only 36 of 70 candidates managed to get through the strict selection process.

Several of the candidates were disqualified because family members work in the legal field. Supreme Court judge Nikolai Biryukov’s wife is a lawyer, his colleague Alexander Zyryanov’s children are building a judicial career. The spouses of Supreme Court judges Nikolai Lavrov and Rita Chakar have been asked to change their jobs in order to have no relationship with the court system. A similar recommendation was given to future chairman of the criminal panel, Vladimir Davydov, whose son works in a prosecutor’s office.

Many candidates were not ready for financial questions. One of the candidates could not remember why he exchanged $50,000 in 2009. Later, it was revealed that the money was exchanged by his son, a car sales manager.

Last February, President Vladimir Putin signed a law merging the Supreme Court with the Supreme Commercial Court. There will be 170 judges overall. New judicial branches will be established in the Supreme Court: one for dealing with economic disputes, and one for military personnel.

Currently, the Russian judicial system has two branches. General jurisdiction courts consider civil lawsuits, crimes and cases involving administrative offenses. This branch of the system is headed by the Supreme Court. Commercial courts, headed by the Supreme Commercial Court, hear economic disputes between legal entities pertaining to civil, administrative and other relationships.