Judges with integrity reservations in line for lifetime payments, the High Council of Justice votes “yes”

Scandalous judge of the District Administrative Court of the city of Kyiv (DACK), Natalia Dobrivska, has become the next in line among the low-integrity judges to receive from the High Council of Justice a green light to lifetime payments of at least UAH 63,000 per month. The judge may also receive 378,000 hryvnias as a one-time severance payment.

From the DACK recordings it is evident that judge Dobrivska was in the inner circle of Pavlo Vovk, the head of DACK, and was fully aware of the sabotage of the qualification assessment in 2019. At the time, around 30 judges repeatedly fell ill en masse to avoid sitting the exam, Dobrivska among them.

When, on April 20, 2026, the judge finally appeared for the assessment at the High Qualifications Commission of Judges, she failed it and decided that the state owed her lifetime payments regardless. This is despite the fact that Dobrivska had been carrying out instructions to implement Pavlo Vovk’s plan to seize judicial power. Dobrivska’s name has appeared more than once in the materials of criminal proceedings.

How can a resignation application nullify the results of judges’ assessments?

On the very day Dobrivska failed the assessment, she submitted an application to the High Council of Justice for an honourable resignation with all possible payments and benefits. No one has abolished this old method of evading accountability: submit a resignation application, then fail to appear at the hearing due to illness so that the 30-day deadline lapses — and that’s it, the HCJ is practically obliged to let you go.

Yesterday, however, on May 26, the HCJ did have a chance to give a fair assessment of the judge’s conduct and dismiss her without payments. Despite the principled position of the case rapporteur Oleh Kandzyuba — that the submission by the HQCJ on Dobrivska’s dismissal from her post should be considered first — HCJ head Hryhorii Usyk put his own proposal to a vote: to defer the matter in order to consider the question of honourable resignation two days later.

This decision was supported by 8 members of the HCJ: Hryhorii Usyk, Stanislav Kravchenko, Serhii Burlakov, Olena Kovbii, Dmytro Krupodera, Oleksii Melnyk, Tetiana Spiridova, and Alla Kotelevets. Should Dobrivska’s resignation application be granted on Thursday, everyone who supports such a decision will be supporting the idea of making the qualification assessment meaningless.

Why does this create a dangerous precedent?

The state has already paid DACK judges UAH 157 million for three years of inactivity. At the same time, it is spending resources on assessing judges and verifying their integrity. But if judges can still proceed to honourable resignation after failing the assessment, the procedure itself loses its purpose. Instead of completing the assessment and considering the dismissal of low-integrity judges, the HCJ may open the door for them to lifetime support at taxpayers’ expense. In that case, the state will be paying not only for years of inactivity, but for decades of future payments.

What needs to change in the law?

The law must be amended so that a resignation application cannot serve as a means of circumventing the assessment. To that end, the period for its consideration should be extended from 30 days to 6 months. Consideration of such applications must also be suspended if the HQCJ has already established that a judge does not meet the requirements of the position held. The right to lifetime payments should be granted only to those judges who have confirmed their integrity during the qualification assessment. It appears that the honourable resignation of DACK judges who for years carried out Vovk’s criminal instructions is becoming standard practice. Last week, judge Kuzmenko resigned. Before long, other DACK judges may do the same, as soon as the HCJ closes disciplinary proceedings against them or the HQCJ schedules an interview as part of the qualification assessment.

The HCJ should understand the consequences of such decisions: they may open the door for low-integrity DACK judges to lifetime payments worth tens of millions of hryvnias, and entrench a culture of impunity.