Reformer of the week – Viktoria Matsedonska
Viktoria Matsedonska, a judge from Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeals, was nominated by the High Qualification Commission to be a judge of the new Supreme Court.
However, the High Council of Justice did not appoint her a judge on Sept. 29, and has delayed consideration of the issue. Critics attribute this to the council’s unhappiness with her independence and principled stance.
Matsedonska spoke out against a ban on EuroMaidan demonstrations by the Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeal in December 2013 to January 2014.
Roman Kuybida, an expert at the Reanimation Package of Reforms, argued that no independent judges had been appointed to the Supreme Court.
“All of the principled judges have dropped out of the competition,” Kuybida said, mentioning Mykhailo Slobodin, Roman Brehei and Serhiy Bondarenko as examples.
Kuybida also said that psychological tests used by the High Qualification Commission were apparently “loyalty tests,” favoring the least independent judges. “For a judge, it’s important to be disloyal,” Kuybida said. “They must be independent.”
The High Qualification Commission initially refused to publish its recommendations on appointing Supreme Court judges. The commission divulged them only recently but they contain no explanations on why candidates were nominated and why the Public Integrity Council’s vetoes on candidates deemed corrupt or dishonest were overridden, Kuybida said.
Kuybida and Roman Maselko, a member of the Public Integrity Council, said that the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice had effectively ignored information provided by the Public Integrity Council.
There is no correlation between the Public Integrity Council’s assessments and the scores for integrity given by the High Qualification Commission, according to Kuybida. Moreover, Public Integrity Council members said they had not been allowed to speak during High Council of Justice meetings.
The High Qualification Commission has also refused to explain its methodology for giving scores to candidates.
Anti-reformer of the week – Ihor Benedysyuk
Ihor Benedysyuk, the chairman of the High Council of Justice, along with his de facto boss President Petro Poroshenko and High Qualification Commission Chairman Serhiy Koziakov, is one of the three officials responsible for the failure of judicial reform.
The High Council of Justice on Sept. 29 appointed 111 new Supreme Court judges, including 25 discredited judges that had been vetoed by the Public Integrity Council, a civil society watchdog, because they are deemed to be corrupt or dishonest. The council said it had grounds to believe that the Supreme Court competition had been rigged in favor of government loyalists.
Benedysyuk was appointed by Poroshenko and has even been awarded a gun by the president.
He used to work for the military court system, subservient to the military leadership. Benedesyuk and the High Council of Justice deny accusations of wrongdoing.
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.
Bohdan Lvov, a new judge of the Supreme Court and chairman of the High Commercial Court, used to work with Benedysyuk at the High Commercial Court and at military courts. Benedesyuk has requested to be exempted from voting for Lvov due to a conflict of interest. Lvov has been investigated in several graft cases.
