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The Public Integrity Council, the judiciary’s civil society watchdog, is suspending its work, citing the High Qualification Commission’s decision to ignore the council’s conclusions and block its work through complicated regulations, Public Integrity Council Member Vitaly Tytych told the Kyiv Post on March 25.
The Public Integrity Council will not participate in what it believes to be the fake vetting of judges, which started on March 23, due to these reasons, Tytych added.
The High Qualificiation Commission, which has denied the Public Integrity Council’s accusations before, did not respond to a request for comment.
The High Qualification Commission has introduced new regulations according to which any decision of the Public Integrity Council must be signed by all of its members. The council says that the requirement will delay or block most of its decisions.
Moreover, the Public Integrity Council was able to veto candidates during the Supreme Court selection process, but those vetoes had to be overriden by two thirds of the High Qualification Commission’s members.
But during the vetting of lower-court judges this year, the Public Integrity Council’s information on judges will stay out of consideration unless there is a ruling by a court or the National Agency for Preventing Corruption against a judge, the High Qualification Commission says. This effectively allows the commissioners to ignore the watchdog’s recommendations.
The High Qualification Commission is planning to vet all of Ukraine’s about 6,000 lower-court judges this year. The Public Integrity Council said it deemed this to be a fake process because neither the High Qualification Commission nor the Public Integrity Council would have time to examine such a large number of judges in such a short time.
Tytych also said that further judicial reform was impossible without replacing the current members of the discredited High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice and without adding civil society representatives to those bodies.
The Public Integrity Council believes that the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice rigged the Supreme Court competition in favor of political loyalists, and will likely rig the the competition for the yet-to-be-created anti-corruption court too. They deny the accusations.
The High Qualification Commission must be deprived of its arbitrary powers to assign scores subjectively during competitions for the yet-to-be-created anti-corruption court and other judges, and such scores must be based on objective criteria, according to Tytych.
During the Supreme Court competition testing, 90 points were assigned for anonymous legal knowledge tests, 120 points for anonymous practical tests. The High Qualification Commission could arbitrarily assign 790 points without giving any explicit reasons, he argued.
Both the law on the judiciary and the High Qualification Commission’s internal regulations must be amended and clarified to clearly assign 750 points for anonymous legal knowledge tests and practical tests (for competitions for both the anti-corruption court and all other courts), Tytych said.
He also said Ukraine’s foreign donors and partners should dominate in a specially created chamber of the High Qualification Commission that will select anti-corruption judges to make sure the selection process is independent.
After the Verkhovna Rada passed a bill on the anti-corruption court in the first reading on March 1, Poroshenko’s longstanding resistance to the court surfaced again.
In a March 6 interview with the Financial Times, Poroshenko refused to ensure that the court is independent and effective. He said that he would resist Western donors’ demands that they have a crucial role in the court’s creation, claiming that this violates Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty.
Tytych and other lawyers argued that a crucial role for foreign donors does not contradict Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty. They see it as a ploy by Poroshenko to ensure that he controls the anti-corruption court.
Meanwhile, thirty discredited judges who do not meet integrity standards, according to the Public Integrity Council, were nominated for the Supreme Court by the High Qualification Commission, and 29 of them were approved by the High Council of Justice. Poroshenko has already appointed 27 of them to the Supreme Court (out of 115 appointees). These judges have undeclared wealth, participated in political cases, made unlawful rulings, including those recognized as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights, or are investigated in corruption cases.
Valentyna Simonenko, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice, registered as a Russian taxpayer in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2015, according to the official register of Russia’s Federal Tax Service. She denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
“By appealing to the illegal occupation authorities and assuming legal obligations before the aggressor country, she effectively recognized the jurisdiction of Crimean occupation authorities and agreed to pay taxes to the aggressor country’s budget, at whose expense the war against the Ukrainian people is being waged,” the Public Integrity Council said.
