Ukraine
had just finished marking the two-year anniversary of the murders of more than
100 protesters during EuroMaidan Revolution, crimes that remain unpunished, when a court on March 1 decided
it was too late to fire judges who made illegal rulings during the three-month
uprising that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych.
The
High Administrative Court
decided that judges can’t be fired more than a year after the passing of the
March 2014 law on the lustration of judges.
The court claimed that the law had conflicting
wording. It stipulated both a one-year and a three-year deadline for the firing
of judges. As a result, the court ruled that three out of the eight judges who
have been fired by the president for prosecuting EuroMaidan activists should be
reinstated.
Critics say this is just another case of judges
covering for their colleagues in Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt and highly
distrusted judicial system.
“The High Administrative Court
chose the approach of never abandoning their own folk,” Roman Kuybida, an
expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, a civil activism group,
told the Kyiv Post. “I don’t know how they could choose this (one-year) term...
I didn’t really understand their motivation.”
Few judges fired
A total of 331 judges involved in EuroMaidan cases
have been probed by the Temporary Special Commission for Inspecting Common-Jurisdiction
Courts, a body set up under the lustration law to investigate judicial
wrongdoing.
The commission has sent documents to the High Council
of Justice justifying the firing of 46 of the 331 judges. The council has
already approved the firing of 22 of them.
But only eight of those judges have already been fired
by the president, while the Verkhovna Rada has yet to vote on firing another
10.
Oleksandra Drik, the head of the Civic Lustration
Committee activist group, told the Kyiv Post that the chairman of parliament’s
law enforcement committee, Ruslan Knyazevich, is reluctant to lustrate judges
and is unlikely to submit recommendations for their dismissal to parliament.
Meanwhile, 19 judges have appealed to the High Administrative Court
against the High Council of Justice’s decision to recommend their dismissal.
The court has already ruled that six of them, including three who have already
been dismissed, should remain in their jobs.
The Supreme Court, which has the final say on the
matter, has yet to make a decision. However, Drik said the court is likely to
rule in favor of the judges, as its head, Yaroslav Romanyuk, has repeatedly
said that he is against reforming the courts.
The dismissed judges cleared by the High Administrative Court
include Nelya Tsybra, who unlawfully ordered the arrest of EuroMaidan activists
in Cherkasy Oblast, Vitaly Litvinov, who kept a EuroMaidan demonstrator in jail
for two months and Dmytro Kravets, who ruled the police could storm the
protester-held Kyiv City Hall in December 2013.
Even the head of the High Council of Justice has
protested against the High AdministrativeCourt’s rulings on the
three judges.
“We shouldn’t keep in place a judge who sent a beaten
person who was pleading for help to jail... or a judge who effectively allowed
(police) to storm Kyiv City Hall,” Ihor Benedysiuk, chairman of the High
Council of Justice, said at a news briefing on March 4.
Delays and sabotage
The commission for checking judges has failed to make
decisions on most of the 331 investigated judges, Maryna Solovyova, the
secretary of the commission, told the Kyiv Post by phone.
The commission twice failed to gather a quorum, after
representatives of first the Verkhovna Rada and then the Supreme Court resigned
from the body, she said.
Both the Verkhovna Rada and the Supreme Court have
been dragging their feet on appointing new representatives, she said.
Solovyova said the hobbled commission would now have
to transfer its powers to the High Council of Justice, though it is not clear
whether the council has the authority to consider such cases.
Ukrainian authorities also delayed the appointment of
members of the High Council of Justice in 2014 and until mid-2015, which made
the lustration of judges impossible. The council only gained a quorum and
started working in June 2015.
Yet
another blow
Another blow to the cleansing of the court system came
when 25 out of the 26 members of the Council of Judges voted on March 3 against
firing Zenovy Kholodnyuk, the head of the State Court Administration.
According to the Justice Ministry, Kholodnyuk has to
be lustrated because he was a deputy head of the State Court Administration
during the EuroMaidan Revolution.
But the Council of Judges claimed that Kholodnyuk is
not subject to lustration because hisposition is
an elected office, as he was selected by the council.
Dmytro Dymov, a deputy head of the lustration
department, dismissed that reasoning as absurd, saying that Kholodnyuk’s job is
explicitly indicated in the lustration law and that only popularly elected
offices are exempt from lustration.
Least trusted institution
Courts were the least trusted out of all other state
institutions before the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, and they have lost
even more in public support in the last two years.
A recent poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation
showed that the number of Ukrainians who don’t trust their courts rose from 72
percent in May 2013 to more than 80 percent in December 2015.
Unpunished
judges
Only the president and parliament can fire a judge, in
a complicated procedure that can be appealed in courts.
This makes firing a judge almost impossible.
Even Serhiy Vovk, who is infamous for presiding over
the show trial of Yury Lutsenko, the former interior minister and now the head
of the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko faction in parliament, is back at work in
Kyiv’s Pechersk district
court. He returned to his job on Feb. 2.
Vovk handed a four-year prison term to Lutsenko in
2012 on abuse of power charges.
The European Court of Human Rights has declared Lutsenko’s prosecution was
politically motivated.
The Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal investigation
against Vovk for issuing an unlawful ruling, but a court sent the indictment back
to prosecutors in January. Vovk was suspended from office for two months due to
the criminal investigation, following which he returned to his job.
Though in March 2015 parliament authorized criminal cases against
Vovk and his fellow Pechersk court judges Oksana
Tsarevych and Viktor Kytsyuk, the investigations have stalled.
Tsarevich and Kytsyuk are suspected of making unlawful
decisions against EuroMaidan protesters. Tsarevich was suspended in March 2015
but then returned to her job in July, before being suspended again in
September.
None of the three judges was detained or put under
house arrest. Courts initially required Kytsyuk and Tsarevich to wear
electronic bracelets, but even these were taken off last May.
Reform
stalled
President Petro Poroshenko called judicial reform a
No. 1 priority in 2014. But two years later, all that has been achieved is
parliament’s approval in February of the first reading of a highly criticized
judicial reform bill.
Kuybida said judicial reform should include the
creation of a new Supreme Court, the hiring of new judges for appeals courts,
and the rigorous vetting of the remaining 6,000 judges of common-jurisdiction
courts.
And even judges themselves admit that Ukraine’s
unreformed judicial system is notoriously corrupt.
“I think the corruption accusations that we hear today
refer to the majority of judges,” Mykola Kozyubra, a retired judge of the
Constitutional Court, told the LB.ua news site last July.
He added that it’s
hard for professional, Western-educated judges to work in Ukraine “because the
system pushes out those who don’t fit into it.”
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