Supreme Court Plenum initiates a competition for more than 50 vacant positions

The Plenum of the Supreme Court (SC) is considering an application to the High Qualifications Commission of Judges (HQCJ) to announce a competition for vacant positions. There are currently more than 50 vacancies.

Filling all vacancies at the Supreme Court after the competition procedure has been improved (through the involvement of international experts) is one of Ukraine’s commitments to its partners on the path to EU accession. This commitment must be implemented by the end of 2027. The key point is: after the procedure has been changed. The law on this must be adopted even earlier — by the end of this year! We hope the HQCJ will observe this sequence and will announce the competition under the new rules.

This time it is important to avoid repeating previous mistakes and to involve international experts with a decisive vote in the integrity vetting of candidates. And the issue is not that Ukrainians are incapable of selecting judges themselves. The problem is that Ukrainian members of the commission can receive a call from a “government office” and be persuaded on how to vote for a particular candidate. We saw this in the NABU tapes involving Olha Stefanishyna. And if a commission member turns out to be stubborn, then he or members of his family can always be influenced by the unreformed prosecution service or the State Bureau of Investigation.

The previous selection to the Supreme Court vividly demonstrated what weak integrity vetting leads to. Two-thirds of the winners of that competition had serious objections raised against them by civil society, but this did not prevent them from obtaining their positions. The heads of the old, liquidated courts took key positions in the new Supreme Court as well.

We still see the consequences of this today — the case of Vsevolod Kniaziev concerning the largest bribe in the court’s history, marked money found with other judges of the Grand Chamber, the Russian passports of Bohdan Lvov and Valentyna Simonenko, and now also the new recordings in the “Femida” case, which feature the heads of three of the four cassation courts.

Beyond that, one should not forget the SC’s already well-established practice of returning the robes to those whom the reformed judicial governance bodies (the HCJ and the HQCJ) have referred for dismissal. Just yesterday we wrote about the case of the “coffee-loving judges” from the Kyiv Court of Appeal, who were caught taking a bribe of 35 thousand dollars. The Grand Chamber of the SC overturned the decision of the High Council of Justice on their dismissal.

The new selection to the Supreme Court must take place under the updated procedure — otherwise there is a risk of once again obtaining the same result and, in a few years, returning yet again to the starting point: to the question of cleansing the Supreme Court.