Majority of judges never enter competition for post

Ukrainians believe corruption and dependence on the politicians and oligarchs to be the main problems of judicial system.

Mykhailo Zhernakov, the expert on judicial reform at the “Reanimation Package of Reforms”, stated this, the Human Rights Information Center correspondent reports.

According to him, the Ukrainian judges will never start to imprison corrupt officials as the current judicial system is completely unable to combat corruption. According to public opinion, it is corruption itself.

“According to the latest research of the Global Corruption Barometer, 66% of Ukrainians believe the judiciary to be the most corrupt field. The level of trust is about 5%, including the answers ‘trust partially” and “trust completely.” The current level of confidence in the Ukrainian judiciary is the lowest in Europe,” Zhernakov said.

According to him, Ukrainians believe that corruption is the main problem of the courts while the second one is dependence of judges on politicians and oligarchs.

“No wonder we see such figures, which are at least interesting and ambiguous. I would say some are even absurd, when a person is fined UAH 25,000 for improper advantage worth UAH 50,000. There are cases when the bail, which is much smaller than the amount of funds that appear as improper advantage, is chosen as preventive measure,” the expert said.

He noted that as of now not a single law, adopted to cleanse the judiciary, had taken effect. These acts includes the law on recovery of confidence in the judiciary, the law on lustration, the law on ensuring the right to fair trial, providing for assessment of judges.

In addition, the draft constitutional amendments, elaborated within the Constitutional Commission, according to the experts, do not secure the effective of judicial reform. Moreover, it to some extent preserves the current state of the judicial system.

The draft has a lot of positive changes, but it does not provide for two things – elimination of the political influence of the president on judges and renovation of the judiciary, the expert said, “Why are we talking about the renovation in the context of amendments to the Constitution? Because all other methods of cleansing have failed. No judge has been dismissed in the manner provided for by three special laws that have been adopted in order to cleanse the judiciary.”

Therefore, the experts of the “Reanimation Package of Reforms” insist that amendments to the Constitution provide for transparent competition for all without exception judgeships within the new judicial system, which corresponds with IV section of the coalition agreement of the Parliament.

According to the expert, the courts should be established by an act of the Verkhovna Rada, not the presidential decrees, as it mostly happens today.

“The majority of current judges has never entered the competition. They were appointed politically. These mechanisms have always been biased, and we definitely can say they have been corrupt. Today, when we should have zero tolerance to corruption in Ukraine, the judicial system does not provide it, unfortunately,” Mykhailo Zhernakov said.

As a reminder, Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk stated that the Constitutional Court of Ukraine had no right to consider the law on lustration, as eight judges of the Constitutional Court are subject to lustration.