The High Council of Justice on Nov. 14 appointed Tetiana Strelets and Serhiy Pohribny as judges of the Supreme Court, bringing the total number of Supreme Court appointees previously accused of wrongdoing to 27.
The candidacies of both Strelets and Pohribny were vetoed by the Public Integrity Council, a civil society watchdog, because it believes they violated judicial ethics. But the vetoes were overridden by the High Qualification Commission and ignored by the High Council of Justice.
Strelets, a judge of the High Administrative Court, has helped judges who unlawfully tried EuroMaidan activists escape justice by cancelling their dismissal by the High Council of Justice, the Public Integrity Council said.
Strelets was also a member of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party in 1986 to 1991 and failed to indicate this in her questionnaire, the council said.
The lifestyle of Pohribny, a judge of Odesa’s Primorsky District Court, does not match his declared income, and he has also violated judicial ethics by banning journalists from filming court hearings, according to the Public Integrity Council.
Pogribny has also issued rulings allowing firms linked to Odesa city councilor Andriy Kislovsky from the Communist Party and Mykhailo Kuchuk, a former deputy mayor of Kyiv and a former deputy mayor of Odesa, to privatize part of a beach in Odesa and acquire part of a zoo in Kyiv, according to the Public Intergrity Council. Other courts recognized legal violations in one of the rulings, and there are also signs of political influence in the cases, the group said.
Moreover, Pogribny’s legal treatises were co-authored by Serhiy Kivalov, ex-head of the High Council of Justice and a former ally of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, the Public Integrity Council said. This may indicate political links between Pogribny and Kivalov, who is highly influential in the judiciary, especially in Odesa, according to the watchdog.
Strelets and Pohribny deny accusations of wrongdoing. Their credentials have yet to be signed by President Petro Poroshenko – a symbolic duty under the Constitution.
Poroshenko on Nov. 10 signed the credentials of 113 new Supreme Court judges.
Of these, 25 were vetoed by the Public Integrity Council. The group accused these judges of having obtained ill-gotten wealth, participated in political cases, made unlawful rulings, or noted that they were under investigation in graft cases.
However, the vetoes were not taken into account by the High Council of Justice, and it has so far failed to explain why it ignored them.
The Public Integrity Council said in a statement on Nov. 13 that Poroshenko had lied when he claimed the Supreme Court competition had taken into account civil society’s opinion.
“We absolutely disagree that civil society’s opinion was taken into account,” the council said. “Moreover, nobody has so far explained to society why vetoes on Supreme Court judges were rejected… We believe the results of the Supreme Court competition to be unjust and incompatible with society’s demands for the cleansing and renewal of the judiciary.”
Meanwhile, High Council of Justice Chairman Ihor Benedysyuk has failed to respond to two Kyiv Post requests on his citizenship and the legality of his appointment.
According to his official biography, in 1994 Benedysyuk was simultaneously a judge of a Russian court martial and a Ukrainian one. Public Integrity Council members say that Russian citizenship was a necessary precondition of being a Russian judge, and that his appointment as a judge of Ukraine was illegal if he had Russian citizenship or was not a Ukrainian citizen.
If Benedysyuk is a Russian citizen now, he does not have a right to hold his job. The High Council of Justice denies that he is currently a Russian citizen but has refused to say when he terminated his Russian citizenship and got a Ukrainian one, or provide any documentary evidence.
