Luanda - The Supreme Court (ST) decided Friday to create a fourth division of the Criminal Chamber, aimed to speed up the processing of the cases, the institution’s spokesman Leandro Lopes has said.

Leandro Lopes was speaking at the end of an ordinary session of the Supreme Court, chaired  by presiding judge.

He said that of the eight new judges who had recently joined the court, five were assigned to the Criminal Chamber, while the other three were placed in the civil one.

Leandro Lopes also said that the institution now have 23 judges, distributed across four chambers, namely Criminal, Civil, Administrative Litigation, Tax and Customs and Labour.

The spokesman said that the arrival of new magistrates had made it possible to redistribute many pending cases, with a view to meeting the challenge of the president of the Supreme Court, Joel Leonardo, to resolve more than 2,000 pending cases by 2025. 

As  example, he noted that the Criminal Chamber, with 12 judges, currently has 1,887 cases, with each of them having close to 150 unresolved cases.

The spokesman stated that the new judges will start their functions next Monday .