The Committee recommended adopting an even worse draft law than the one criticised by the Venice Commission

On 30 September, the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Legal Policy recommended that Parliament adopt, as a basis, draft law No. 16018 on competitions for the High Qualifications Commission of Judges and the High Council of Justice. The authors of the draft law are Volodymyr Vatras, Ivan Kalaur and Mykola Stefanchuk. The Committee recommended rejecting the alternative government draft law No. 16018-1.

This followed just a few days after the Venice Commission and the Council of Europe Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law published an urgent opinion on the government’s reform model.

In its opinion, the Venice Commission supported the main idea: continuing the participation of internationally nominated experts in selecting almost the entire new composition of the HQCJ. It confirmed that such a mechanism does not contradict Ukraine’s sovereignty and is consistent with its European integration commitments. We published a detailed analysis here.

Yet the Committee did not even recommend the government model, on which the Venice Commission raised a number of significant remarks. It chose a draft law in which the guarantees of the international experts’ influence on the key issue are even weaker.

In the government draft No. 16018-1, internationally nominated members have a special role at least in the assessment of a candidate’s integrity: a decision requires four votes, two of which must belong to the international members, and in the event of a tie, the position supported by two international experts may prevail. For the assessment of professional competence, this safeguard no longer exists: among the four votes, just one international vote is sufficient.

In draft No. 16018, recommended by the Committee, internationally nominated members have no decisive vote at all. Decisions on integrity and professional competence require four votes, but the votes of the international members carry no special weight. In a 3–3 split, the candidate is eliminated from the competition.

This contradicts the Venice Commission’s approach. It recommends extending the enhanced voting rule to all key decisions on candidates: not only to integrity, but also to professional competence and the compilation of the final list of recommended candidates.

And this is not the only problem with No. 16018. Like the government draft, it:

• provides for only a two-year term of the special composition of the Selection Commission;
• allows, under certain conditions, the seats of the international quota to be transferred to the Council of Prosecutors, the Council of Attorneys and the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine;
• does not provide for a separate independent secretariat of the Selection Commission.

These are precisely the elements the Venice Commission proposes to revisit. In paragraph 90 of the opinion, it specifically emphasises not only each risk individually, but their cumulative effect: the concentration of organisational control in the HCJ and its secretariat, the weakening of the international component, the possibility of transferring the international quota to national bodies and the automatic expiry of the commission’s mandate after two years may together result in international participation retaining the form of the previous model but losing its substance.

At the same time, an alternative model of international expert participation appeared in Parliament long before the current initiatives. As early as 18 June 2025, Anastasiia Radina and a group of MPs registered draft law No. 13382.

It did not solve all the problems either, but its logic was to continue the successful model of involving international experts with their decisive role in decision-making. Almost 90 civil society organisations called for the draft law to be supported. However, the Verkhovna Rada never did so.

So the key question remains open: will internationally nominated experts have real influence on the outcome of the competition, or will their presence on the Selection Commission turn into mere imitation?

If MPs adopt draft law No. 16018 as a basis, painstaking work awaits them ahead of the second reading. It is precisely the incorporation of all the Venice Commission’s comments that will be the moment of truth and will show whether Ukraine’s European integration commitments are a genuine guide, or merely empty words and yet another pretext for imitating reform.