Court of Cassation of Belgium

The Court of Cassation of Belgium is the supreme court of the Belgian judiciary, composed of thirty judges with life tenure who are nominated by the High Council of Justice of Belgium and appointed by the federal government. It handles cases in Belgium's two main languages, Dutch and French, with certain facilities for German, and is assisted by a separate public prosecutor's office and bar association, the former providing advisory opinions on how the law should be interpreted and the latter assisting litigants, whose participation is mandatory in certain cases. Modeled originally on its French namesake, the Court hears appeals in last resort only on points of law, without reviewing or reconsidering a lower court's findings of fact, and it either upholds a contested decision or annuls it for violating or misinterpreting the law, a process called cassation. It does not hear appeals against administrative decisions, which fall to the Council of State of Belgium, nor does it rule on the constitutionality of laws, which is the Constitutional Court of Belgium's role, though it does settle certain jurisdictional conflicts, prejudicial questions from other courts, and proceedings against judges or prosecutors. The Court has no discretion to select which cases it hears and so must consider every case properly brought before it, issuing a single ruling with no published dissenting opinions in each case; unlike common law precedent, its rulings bind only the case at hand, though they carry strong persuasive weight for lower courts.