Ukraine risks losing hundreds of millions of euros from the EU due to the failure to adopt key judicial reform laws

Ukraine will receive €2.3 billion in financial assistance under the Ukraine Facility programme. However, this is only part of the funds the state could have counted on if all commitments had been fulfilled. Approximately €700 million has remained unavailable for several months due to the failure to adopt laws on judges’ integrity declarations and the digitalisation of enforcement proceedings.

As regards integrity declarations, the authorities have failed to prepare a high-quality draft law that would meet the Ukraine Facility conditions and adopt it in the second quarter of 2025. It should be stressed that €700 million (around UAH 30 billion) is equivalent to the annual food budget of the Ukrainian army. If parliament does not pass the promised draft law by June 2026, the Ukrainian budget will irreversibly lose these funds.

Integrity declarations: why the current system does not work

The new system for verifying integrity declarations was supposed to become an effective tool for cleansing the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, whose reform the European Union has been calling for since 2022. In its 2025 Enlargement Report, the European Commission noted that the review of Supreme Court judges should be temporary but substantive, with the involvement of independent experts delegated by international partners.

Instead, the current model of integrity declarations is largely a formality. Judges submit integrity declarations annually, stating, for example, that they do not hold citizenship of another country or have not adopted decisions under a conflict of interest. In theory, if a review reveals otherwise, a judge may be held liable. In practice, however, these declarations are rarely checked, and the mechanism hardly works at all. Not a single judge has been dismissed for false information in an integrity declaration. The reason is simple: liability arises only for the intentional submission of false data, and proving such intent in practice is almost impossible.

Therefore, under the Ukraine Facility financial support programme, Ukraine was supposed to improve the system for verifying judges’ integrity declarations by Q2 2025. This included clarifying their content, extending the period subject to review, and improving verification mechanisms. The document also stated that these changes are necessary to address corruption risks in the Supreme Court and to improve the selection of new judges to it with the involvement of independent experts.

Draft laws No. 13165 and No. 13165-2: imitation of reform instead of change

Draft law No. 13165, submitted by MPs ostensibly to fulfil the EU requirement on integrity declarations, did not address the above problems. For example, it did not provide for an extended review period (one year only), as required by the Ukraine Facility, and proposed reviewing Supreme Court judges without the participation of international experts.

The alternative draft law No. 13165-2, which parliament adopted in the first reading, also fails to meet either the Ukraine Facility requirements or public demand. Moreover, it not only fails to solve key problems but, in some respects, even worsens the situation. For instance, it contains no mechanisms whatsoever to ensure the review of Supreme Court judges with the involvement of international experts holding a decisive role.

What needs to change, and why there will be no reform without cleansing the Supreme Court

For the verification of integrity declarations to become a real tool for cleansing the judiciary, draft law No. 13165-2 must be fundamentally revised. First of all, it should provide for a one-off mandatory review of all current Supreme Court judges before any new selections to that court. Such a review must cover the entire judicial career, not just a short period, and be conducted by a body in which independent international experts have a decisive vote.

The integrity declaration system should operate under the logic of a “zero declaration”: a judge submits a comprehensive declaration covering the entire judicial career, and any inaccurate information in it (regardless of when the underlying misconduct occurred) is deemed a disciplinary offence at the moment of submission. This makes it possible to hold a judge liable within limitation periods and triggers a disciplinary procedure with real consequences — up to dismissal. Only after such a baseline review do annual declarations and regular oversight make sense. Without this, declarations will remain a formality that ignores past misconduct.

Conducting a new selection without first reviewing current Supreme Court judges will not change the situation in substance. As long as the majority of Supreme Court judges have serious integrity concerns, it is they who will shape judicial practice on dismissals and effectively determine the course of reform. Under such conditions, even a high-quality competition cannot offset the negative influence of the old composition. Therefore, a one-off mandatory review of all current Supreme Court judges is a necessary precondition for any new selection: only after removing judges of low integrity can the renewal of the Court be real rather than decorative.

Thus, against the backdrop of the Supreme Court reinstating scandal-tainted judges such as Inna Otrosh and increasingly interfering with the discretion of the reformed HQCJ and HCJ, its cleansing should have become the top reform priority. However, draft law No. 13165-2 effectively offers no solution to the crisis at the country’s highest judicial instance.

As a result, two things are happening simultaneously: Ukraine is missing out on hundreds of millions of euros that are critically important, including for financing the army, and it is trying to sell the European Union an imitation of reform in the form of an empty draft law. If the situation is not corrected in the near future, the worst-case scenario will be a formal “fulfilment of commitments” without any real change. That would mean yet another empty nothing — with a very real price: in money, in trust, and in a lost chance to break the system of judicial impunity.