The PIC should develop objective and formalized criteria to participate in evaluating the integrity of judges and judicial candidates - the Final Report of the Council of Europe on the results of monitoring the PIC’s activities
On 23 February 2018, the meeting of the final Steering Committee of the Council of Europe Project “Support to the Implementation of the Judicial Reform in Ukraine” took place.
At the event the final report of the Council of Europe and the Ukrainian Bar Association on the results of monitoring the activities of the Public Council of Integrity in the context of the Council of Europe standards and recommendations was presented.
The monitoring was carried out by the experts of the Council of Europe Project “Support to the Implementation of the Judicial Reform in Ukraine” Ms. Olga Lopushanska and Mr. Nikita Nuralin on the basis of the CoE Opinion on the Rules of Procedure of the Public Council of Integrity of Ukraine in the context of the Council of Europe standards and recommendations regarding the independence and assessment of judges and the other standards and recommendations of the Council of Europe regarding the independence of the judiciary, the assessment of judges, the correlation between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches of power, and the society.
The international experts have analyzed the opinions on the inconsistency of the professional ethics and integrity of 269 candidates for the positions of the Supreme Court judges and the separate opinions of the PIC members in this regard, as well as have drawn up the relevant recommendations.
As it is stressed in the Report on the results of monitoring the activities of the Public Council of Integrity, the PIC should develop the objective and formalized criteria to evaluate the integrity of judicial candidates.
Among other important recommendations the experts have suggested:
1) to develop and adopt the common standards of drafting PIC’s documents, as well as their typical structure;
2) to specify in further documentation the norms of legislation, international standards, rules of professional ethics, which, according to the PIC’s opinion, the candidate does not meet or has violated;
3) to verify the received information and use only reliable sources;
4) to unify the approaches regarding provision of the opinion or information;
5) to refrain from evaluating the professional competence in general and assessing judgments in particular;
6) to ensure the institutional consistency of the PIC by developing and adopting the methodology for collecting and verifying information, methodology and typical structure of the PIC’s documents.
A special emphasis was laid on the need to provide an opportunity for a judge or a judicial candidate to read the PIC’s document (opinion or information) before its publication.
Also, in the framework of the event the Management of the Council of Europe Office and the Project presented the results of the Project’s activities for 2016-2017 and the importance of the Project’s support in the process of the implementation of the judicial reform in Ukraine was discussed.
The Commission’s members Mr. Mykhailo Makarchuk and Mr. Taras Lukash thanked the CoE Project for its assistance provided to the Commission in the part of its activities, in particular, the examination of the Commission’s internal normative legal acts regarding the procedures of the qualification assessment of judges and the selection of candidates for the judicial positions; drawing up the draft forms of declarations of judicial integrity and declarations of family relations of a judge (a candidate for the judicial position), as well as the technical requirements for electronic forms of those declarations.
The key partners of the Project took part in the discussion: the High Council of Justice, the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine, the National School of Judges of Ukraine, the Council of Judges of Ukraine, the State Judicial Administration of Ukraine and others.
You can read the Ukrainian version of the Report of the CoE and the UBA on the results of monitoring the activities of the Public Council of Integrity in the context of the Council of Europe standards and recommendations on the active link.
