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.”
Judge Serhiy Vovk announces the verdict to former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko in Pechersk district court in Kyiv on Feb. 27, 2012. Lutsenko was sentenced to four years of prison and released by pardon in April 2013. In 2015, judge Vovk lost his job over this illegal ruling, but was reinstated by the courts in February. (UNIAN)
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 Administrative Court’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 his position 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.”
