The divorce rate has grown 44 percent in the past 15 years, according to the Czech Statistical Office, and soon the office predicts that half of all marriages here could end in divorce. This trend prompted the Czech Union of Judges (ČSU) recently to release a report that recommended taking certain divorce cases out of the hands of the courts and giving them to administrators.

Only five European countries have such a system, known as administrative divorce: Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Russia.

ČSU President Jaromír Jirsa says administrative divorce would only apply to proceedings where both parties agree to dissolve the marriage. Having judges preside over such cases is a waste of the courts' time, Jirsa says, and such cases should be dealt with by the marriage registration office where the couple was married.

"Courts should handle real cases only," says Jirsa. "If a couple reaches agreement in all fields, nobody can prevent them from a divorce. In such cases a court becomes more of an observer."

Jirsa could not give an exact number of divorce cases now languishing in the courts, but says adopting administrative divorce would clear several hundred cases from court dockets each year, especially in Prague, Brno and Plzeň.

Custody cases drag

Klára Veselá-Samková, a human rights lawyer and expert on child custody issues, says not every divorce case is a drawn out ordeal: It's just those involving the welfare of children that slow things down.

Under the current family law, couples with children are not allowed to get divorced until custody rights and child support payments are worked out, causing what Veselá-Samková calls a "total court debacle."

"The children are state hostages when the couples are getting divorced," she says. "I know of divorces in which the father insisted on the custody of his child where the verdict wasn't passed for nine years."

Jirsa says that custody cases can take years, even when the actual divorce is settled in a matter of weeks. But the ČSU has been unable to figure out how to quicken the pace of custody cases while at the same time acting in the best interest of the children involved.

Judicial backlog

Some experts say the divorce process in this country does not need to be fixed.

"The Czech divorce law is adequate in comparison with regulations in other countries," says Milana Hrušáková, a lawyer and professor on the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University in Brno.

Hrušáková says she can understand why judges don't like the current divorce law, but many important questions should have been on the public agenda before the ČSU released its proposal. Clearly defined regulations that would weed out simple cases would be better than what the ČSU proposed, Hrušáková says.

But others say the ČSU's proposal does not go far enough to address problems of efficiency throughout country's entire judicial system.

Last year, 1,443 Czechs filed complaints to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. An overwhelming number of those cases concerned the excessive length of proceedings in Czech courts, records show.

Justice Minister Pavel Němec will have to answer for those complaints in a report he has to present to the government before general elections in June.

Critics are concerned that by recommending legislative changes to the process of divorce here, the ČSU is blurring the line between the judicial and legislative branches of government.

Jirsa says his organization is merely making a suggestion, and he added that he has not yet heard of a Chamber Deputy willing to propose such a motion in the lower house.

The Union will be pushing for it until that sponsor is found.

"It is unlikely that the issue would get on the legislative agenda before the June general polls," Jirsa says. "We'll see what happens after the elections."