Kyiv, Ukraine – During the decade since Pro -Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fell in 2014, Ukrainian legislators struggled to reform a corrupt judicial system. A multitude of anti-corruption organizations have been created, among which the Public Integrity Council, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the High Council of Justice and others.
The scale of the problem is vast. A 2020 analysis of the Atlantic Council, a Washington -based reflection group, based in DC, compared the judiciary to a criminal union.
There has been progress. In 2024, 48 judges were rejected for various accusations, including the collusion of the Russians. In May 2023, the chief of the Supreme Court was arrested, accused of having made a bridge pot of 2.7 million dollars. Last year, judge Larysa Bohomolova of the Berdyansk district court on the sea of the Côte d’Azov was rejected by the Council of Justice for having sent military information sensitive to the Russian government. Two hundred miles to the west, in the port of the Black Sea of Kherson, another judge who was also suspected of working for the Russians, Natalia Sharko, was dismissed for having raped the judicial disciplinary codes.
The High Council of Justice is at the heart of these efforts. He created the investigation system to be accessible, to ensure that allegations against judges are heard from the whole spectrum of Ukrainian society.
But this accessibility, according to criticism, is too easy to abuse. There is now a backlog of more than 13,000 complaints against the country’s system of around 4,400 judges. Some complaints are serious, such as those alleging treason or high level corruption. But others are petty or focus on the issues outside the goal of a judge. According to a complaint, a judge refused to delay the start of a court hearing when someone was late. Another complainant sought to hold a judge responsible for the delay of a city administration to light his heating and hot water services.
At the end of 2024, the council created the Disciplinary Inspectors Service To investigate the complaints of this queue, to which about two dozen complaints are added every day. But the division employs only 18 inspectors, who say that they each make a complaint per day.
Vitaliy Salikhov, the former acting council of the High Council of Justice, said that the objective of many complaints is to put pressure on the judges or to create reasons for the recusation of a judge. The law is written in such a way that the accusations can be brought for almost all official gaps – from a simple remark to delays in writing a decision, he said. This creates an atmosphere of “infinite paralysis”, he says, where “the judges are stuck and afraid of making decisions”.
The complaint deposit process is so lax that it has become a profitable company, adds Salikhov.
Dozens of people file mass complaints, he says, for a small payment, generally a few hundred US dollars, people who want complaints filed, but not in their name.
“We continue to see the same family names again and again,” explains Salikhov.
In one case, a complaint was filed on the allegation that the judge had used blasphemies during a hearing. The inspectors discovered that the name listed on the complaint was that of someone who had died months before.
“We call these” serious complaints “, explains an inspector, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.
Other cases are serious, but not directly linked to war or corruption. In June 2023, a judge was accused of hitting a pedestrian while driving drunk. The High Council did not decided if the judge was guilty of a crime – this verdict should be decided by a criminal court. But the council determined that the judge’s behavior in the incident night has undermined the authority of the court and rejected him from his post.
“Conscientious judges fear not only to be rightly held responsible for their actions, but also to be subject to an illegitimate punishment disguised as a legal procedure – which means the use of apparently legitimate procedural tools which are really illegal,” explains Oleh Yurkiv, a judge of the district court of Hallyskyi in the western city of LVIV.
Roman Maselko, a member of the High Council of Justice, said that many dismissals of legitimately betrayal or corrupt judges would not have occurred if only the persons directly affected by the actions of a judge were authorized to file a complaint. Even so, he says, allowing militant organizations to file the Surbourn complaints of the system. These organizations should not be authorized to maintain that people wishing to file complaints and do not file them on behalf of anyone, he says.
For the moment, the tribunal complaint system creates its own dysfunction, explains Markiyan Halabala, judge of Ukraine High Anti-Corruption.
“Many colleagues judges are afraid of making decisions because a judge finds himself with an enemy in the form of the party who does not agree with the decision,” he said.