56 Legal Digest of International Fair Trial Rights must be established on objective and reasonable grounds in order to justify the distinction between such tribunals and ordinary courts.186 3.1.4 Jury trial As to the form of the tribunal established by law, the Human Rights Committee has determined that the ICCPR does not confer the right to trial by jury, nor does it confer a right to be tried by professional judges. The touchstone is that all judicial proceedings, with or without a jury, must conform to the guarantees of a fair trial.187 Similarly, the European Court of Human Rights has acknowledged that jury trials exist in a variety of forms in different States, reflecting each State’s history, tradition and legal culture. The European Court has also recognized that a State’s choice of a particular criminal justice system is in principle outside the scope of the Court’s supervision, limiting its task to consider whether the system adopted has led in a given case to results which are compatible with the ECHR.188 3.2 Competent tribunal The right to a fair hearing by a “competent” tribunal is only expressly referred to within Article 14(1) of the ICCPR, although this has been treated as an implicit requirement of Article 6(1) of the ECHR. The expression is not defined in the ICCPR, but competence has been understood as involving three requirements: competence of individual judicial officers (See also 3.2.1); competence of a tribunal to make a binding decision (See also 3.2.2); and jurisdictional competence of a tribunal (See also 3.2.3). The objective of these requirements is to ensure that each tribunal is competent to decide on matters brought before it. 3.2.1 Competence of individual judicial officers The ordinary meaning of the expression “competence” calls for a tribunal to be staffed by competent judicial officers, i.e., suitably qualified and experienced persons to act as judicial officers. There are two issues to be considered in this regard. The first concerns procedures to ensure the proper selection, recruitment, promotion and retirement of judges (See also 3.3.1). The second relates to whether the requirement of competence can be measured against errors made by judicial officers and, in turn, the extent to which a State can be held responsible for errors by individual judges or tribunals in particular cases. On the latter point, the Human Rights Committee has repeatedly said that Article 14 guarantees procedural equality and fairness but cannot be interpreted as ensuring the absence of error on the part of a competent tribunal,189 explaining that it is generally for domestic courts to review facts and evidence, unless it can be shown that such evaluation was clearly arbitrary or amounted to a manifest error or denial of justice, or that the court otherwise violated its 186 UN Human Rights Committee, CCPR General Comment 32 (2007), para 14. 187 See, for example: Kavanagh v Ireland, HRC Communication 819/1998, UN Doc CCPR/C/71/D/819/1998 (2001), para 10.1; and Wilson v Australia, HRC Communication 1239/2004, UN Doc CCPR/ C/80/D/1239/2004 (2004), para 4.4. 188 Taxquet v Belgium [2010] ECHR 1806, paras 83–84. 189 UN Human Rights Committee, CCPR General Comment 32 (2007), para 26; and B. d. B. et al. v the Netherlands, HRC Communication 273/1988, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/35/D/273/1988 (1989), para 6.4.