Bohdan Monich: who is leading the Council of Judges and how

In just a week, on September 18, the Congress of Judges of Ukraine will elect a new composition of the Council of Judges, who will later decide on their chairperson. Since 2019, Bohdan Monich, a close associate of Pavlo Vovk, has held this position.

Bohdan Monich’s career trajectory has been remarkably swift. In 2009, he became head of the Chernyakhiv District Court in Zhytomyr Oblast. By 2012, he was a judge at the Zhytomyr Administrative Court of Appeal, and a year later, he was promoted to deputy head of that court. In 2014, he joined the Council of Judges of Ukraine, and by 2019, he had become its head.

The circumstances of Monich’s appointment as head of the Council of Judges are particularly noteworthy. From the “Vovk tapes,” it became known that Pavlo Vovk himself, Andriy Portnov, and Andriy Bohdan coordinated the dismissal of Oleh Tkachuk from the position and promoted their “loyal” candidate in his place:

“We decided to get rid of Tkachuk. We calculated the ratings and figured that if Butenko was ambiguous, so we could ‘play it’ with Monich,” Pavlo Vovk stated in recorded conversations from his office.

The first thing Monich did as the head of the Council of Judges was to halt the order to inspect the District Administrative Court of Kyiv (DACK). Subsequently, he continued to be very loyal to DACK and its head, Vovk. After the publication of the “Vovk tapes,” Monich not only did not condemn Vovk, but also publicly defended him.

Additionally, Bohdan Monich may be involved in the so-called “amber” case — a criminal investigation by NABU into the receipt of bribes by former MP Boryslav Rosenblat for assisting a foreign company in extracting amber in Ukraine. Monich was on the panel of judges that upheld the first-instance court’s decision to suspend the special permits for the exploration of amber deposits.