You're reading: Winners of competition for Supreme Court announced

The reloading of Ukraine’s Supreme Court is about to be completed as the results of the first transparent competition to the country’s highest judicial body arrive.

The High Qualification Commission of Judges, the body that ran the competition, published the names of 120 winning candidates – 30 judges for each of the Supreme Court’s four branches: administrative, economic, criminal and civil.

Now, the High Council of Justice has one month to approve the candidates. Then, President Petro Poroshenko will formally appoint the new Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court needs the minimum of 65 judges to function, meaning that not all of the 120 winners may actually make it past the High Council of Justice and into the chamber.

Poroshenko praised the result of the competition, saying that for the first time “not only judges but also lawyers and scientists – those people outside the judicial system” made it to the list.

But some of the winners alerted the activists watching the selection.

Among them are judges who made politically motivated decisions, participated in political persecutions, prohibited peaceful protests, and those who couldn’t explain the nature of their assets.

The Public Integrity Council, a civil society body that oversees ongoing judicial reform in Ukraine, including the Supreme Court competition, said that at least 76 out of 319 finalists that were interviewed had been negatively assessed for their background.

Many of them became winners, selected to work in the Supreme Court.

According to Mykhailo Zhernakov, a leading expert on the judiciary and a member of the Public Integrity Council, at least 25 percent of the winners of the competition show signs of being corrupt.

Zhernakov notes that many of them could not explain their income, luxurious cars and real estate, but somehow that didn’t alert the commission.

New court, old names

Some of the most notorious judges managed to ace the competition and are likely to sit in the new Supreme Court.

Those include Oleksandr Zolotnikov of Odesa Administrative Court of Appeal who banned peaceful protests during 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, and Nataliya Antonenko of Kyiv’s Dniprovskyi District Court, who declared Hr 1.6 million income in 2011-2016 and property worth Hr 3.7 million.

Another one is Stanislav Holybytskyi who in 2008 sentenced a person to life imprisonment without sufficient evidence. Oleksandr Banchuk of the Center of Policy and Legal Reform said the sentence was based mainly on the testimony of a mentally unstable person.

Tetiana Drobotova, who also made it to the list of winners, did not declare two land plots and her husband’s car, and occasionally visited Crimea after Russia illegally annexed the peninsula in early 2014. Drobotova’s son is charged with killing two people in a car accident.

Another winner, Bohdan Lvov of the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine, was featured in several journalistic investigations. His lifestyle didn’t match his declared income.

Some of the candidates opted out of the competition on their own in an effort to avoid responsibility for failing to meet ethical standards, the Public Integrity Council said.

In early July, Serhiy Stanik of Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal withdrew his candidacy after an investigative TV show Nashi Groshi revealed that Stanik owns six cars, which he didn’t put on his declaration of assets.

Fresh blood

Some of the final candidates won praise from the civil activists following the selection.

One of them was Arkadiy Bushchenko, a well-known human rights lawyer who is currently the Executive Director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.

Halia Chyzhyk from Public Integrity Council welcomed the selection of Aleksandr Mamaluy of the Commercial Court of Kharkiv Oblast and Hanna Vronska, a U.S.-educated lawyer and a former acting ministry of ecology and Olena Kibenko, a professor of the Department of Business Law at the National Law Academy of Ukraine a fresh blood in the list of 120 judges.

“They will do everything for judicial reform to work,” Chyzhyk said.