As President Volodymyr Zelensky’s team is announcing large-scale judicial reform, the people who will be entrusted to work on such reform include many tainted officials mired in corruption scandals.
Zelensky on Aug. 7 issued a decree to create a commission in charge of legal reform. The commission will be in charge of constitutional amendments, judicial reform, criminal law reform, legal education and re-integration of Russian-occupied territories.
Apart from a few reform-minded experts, the commission includes numerous controversial individuals who face accusations of corruption and other wrongdoing.
Zelensky’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Roman Maselko and Mykhailo Zhernakov – members of the Public Integrity Council, the judiciary’s civil society watchdog – lambasted the commission’s composition, arguing it will not be able to reform anything.
The legal reform commission includes five judges who have been vetoed by the Public Integrity Council because they do not meet integrity and professional ethics standards. These include Supreme Court judges Bohdan Lvov, Stanislav Kravchenko and Mykhailo Smokovych, as well as lower-level judges Vadym Butenko and Roman Boyko.
The judges have denied the accusations of wrongdoing. However, the High Qualification Commission of Judges has ignored the Public Integrity Council’s vetoes and did not bar them from judicial jobs.
Lvov case
Lvov, who was appointed to the Supreme Court under Poroshenko, is under investigation in the case in which ex-High Commercial Court Chairman Viktor Tatkov and his deputy Artur Yemelyanov have been charged with issuing unlawful rulings. Lvov has not been officially charged in the case and denies all accusations of wrongdoing.
Boyko, who was also appointed to the legal reform commission, is a protégé of Yemelyanov, according to the Public Integrity Council’s official decision on vetoing the judge.
Meanwhile, in 2016 High Council of Justice member Pavlo Grechkivsky was charged with extorting a $500,000 for favorable court rulings with the help of Lvov. Both of them deny the accusations.
Oleg Shklyar, who was arrested with the money, testified he had been planning to give it to Grechkivsky. The investigators also released a wiretapped phone conversation in which Grechkivsky instructs Shklyar to give him the bribe. However, in 2018 Grechkivsky was acquitted by a court.
Yuriy Voloshin, who was also appointed as a member of the legal reform commission, sparked controversy because he drafted a ruling that Grechkivsky and Oleksiy Malovatsky could be elected to the High Council of Justice for a second time in February, despite the constitutional ban on such an appointment.
According to the Public Integrity Council and investigative journalists, Lvov had links to Poroshenko. He used to work with former High Council of Justice Chairman Igor Benedysyuk, a Poroshenko ally, at the High Commercial Court and at military courts. Lvov has also been filmed by Radio Liberty at the birthday party of Valery Heletei, who headed Poroshenko’s security guard detachment.
Other Supreme Court judges
Another member of the legal reform commission, Smokovych, canceled the dismissal of judges who unlawfully prosecuted EuroMaidan activists, the Public Integrity Council said. He is also under investigation over unlawful interference in the automatic distribution of cases and has thwarted the investigation, according to the civic watchdog.
Kravchenko, who was also appointed to the legal reform commission, released senior police officer Olexiy Pukach from custody, which allowed him to flee in 2003, with Pukach’s lawyer saying that this was done on the orders of then President Leonid Kuchma. Pukach was later caught and convicted in 2013 of murdering journalist GeorgIy Gongadze.
Kravchenko also failed to declare a land plot and a house in 2012 to 2014.
Another commission member, Supreme Court judge Borys Hulko, was filmed walking out of Poroshenko’s administration by Radio Liberty in 2017, saying that he had discussed procedural codes. Hulko was also filmed by Radio Liberty at the birthday party of Heletei, who headed Poroshenko’s security guard detachment, in the same year.
Hulko’s wife Tetyana Kryzhanivska works at BIM law firm, which is co-owned by pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Hulko denies having any ties to Medvedchuk.
Yet another new commission member, Supreme Court Judge Natalia Blazhyvska, is a daughter of Yevhen Blazhyvsky, an ex-deputy of Yanukovych’s infamous Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka.
Constitutional Court mess
Another new commission member, Yury Baulin, was the chairman of the Constitutional Court under Yanukovych.
Baulin and several incumbent and former judges of the Constitutional Court are under investigation in an usurpation of power case over issuing decisions that increased Yanukovych’s powers and allowed lawmakers to switch from opposition parties to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in 2010.
According to records in Yanukovych’s Party of Regions’ alleged off-the-book ledger, judges from the Constitutional Court received $6 million from the Party of Regions for making rulings that helped Yanukovych usurp power.
Prosecutors have prepared a notice of suspicion for one of the former judges of the Constitutional Court, and more notices of suspicion are expected to follow, according to Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia investigations unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Tainted judicial bodies
Legal reform commission member Oleksandr Drozdov is a member of the High Qualification Commission of Judges, while Andriy Vasylenko is a former member of the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice.
Mykhailo Isakov, who was also appointed to the commission, is an ex-member of the High Council of Justice, and Viktor Gryshchuk and Svitlana Shelest are current members of the council.
Both the High Council of Justice and the High Qualification Commission – the judiciary’s governing bodies – have been accused by the Public Integrity Council, anti-corruption groups and legal experts of blocking judicial reform under Poroshenko and promoting tainted judges. They have denied the accusations.
Zelensky and his team have recognized that judicial reform spearheaded by the High Council of Justice and the High Qualification Commission under Poroshenko had failed and agreed that these bodies need to be re-launched and replaced.
Ironically, Isakov and Vasylenko, who were appointed to Zelensky’s commission on legal reform, were fired by Zelensky himself from the High Council of Justice in June. He argued that their appointment by Poroshenko in violation of competition procedures had been unlawful.
Meanwhile, Shelest, another member of the judicial reform commission, does not meet integrity standards, according to anti-corruption activists.
Kateryna Butko, an activist at the AutoMaidan anti-corruption watchdog, leaked her name before her appointment in December, saying she was being pushed by the authorities in violation of competition procedures. Shelest has received a $1 million apartment as a “gift,” according to the property register.
She did not respond to a request for comment.
Other tainted members
New commission member Oleksandr Paseniuk headed the High Administrative Court in 2004 to 2011 and was a Constitutional Court judge under Yanukovych. According to the alleged black ledger of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions partially published in 2016, the party gave bribes worth $15 million to judges of the High Administrative Court. One of the entries says “Paseniuk, security” — $55,000.”
In 2014 the Verkhovna Rada fired Paseniuk from the Constitutional Court for violating his oath as a judge.
Paseniuk is the uncle of Makar Paseniuk, Poroshenko’s personal banker and head of investment bank ICU. Oleksandr Paseniuk did not respond to a request for comment.
Anatoly Martsynkevych, who also joined the commission, was a member of the High Qualification Commission under Yanukovych and is banned from state jobs under the 2014 lustration law on the firing of Yanukovych-era officials. His son Vitaly Martsynkevych has been fired for allegedly unlawful rulings against EuroMaidan protesters.
Mykhailo Buromensky, who also became a member of the commission, was appointed as an auditor of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine by the Cabinet in 2017 as part of what his critics believed to be an effort by Poroshenko to control the bureau or decrease its independence.
Reformist members
Meanwhile, the reform-minded experts on the legal reform commission include Ruslan Riaboshapka, a former top official of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption; Anastasia Krasnosilska, a former expert at the Anti-Corruption Action Center, Roman Kuybida, a member of the Public Integrity Council, and ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko.
“There will be no point (in joining the commission) if I will be the voice of one crying in the wilderness like in (Poroshenko’s Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Filatov’s judicial reform) commission,” Kuybida told the Kyiv Post. “However, if there are enough decent people, I’ll try to work there.”
