“The Game Begins, Your Honors!”

A recent briefing at the Ministry of Justice attended by its department chairs Inna Yemelianova, Vasyl Yurchenko, and Stanislav Kotorobai, discussed the key problems of a judicial reform in Ukraine.

The reform calls for the establishment of new subjects in the third branch of government, for example, a Court of Appeals and Court of Cassation (supreme court of appeals) as intermediary links between the Supreme Court and the appellate and local courts with a view to easing the burden on the court of last resort. It is necessary to determine by December 1 the number of judges for these courts, to form their staffs, appoint the judges, the chairperson and deputy chairpersons, and in other words to increase the number of jobs.

The next stage of transformation (from June 1, 2002 to June 1, 2005) will see the introduction of a system of specialized administrative courts. It is imperative to set up as early as in 2002 the High Administrative Court of Ukraine and vest it with the power to generalize the practice of applying current law by courts in the public and legal sphere of social relations.

On January 1, 2003 the State Judicial Administration of Ukraine and its territorial branches will begin operations. This entity, as Mr. Yurchenko noted, has no legitimate instruments to affect court rulings and will thus present no danger to the independence of judges: its purpose is to properly organize the functioning of courts, especially paperwork and statistics.

The Supreme Court of Ukraine has also had its functions revised: from now on it will only deal with repeated appeals and generalization of judicial practice, Ms. Yemelianova noted.

The chairpersons of appellate and local courts, as well their boards, are responsible for creating the appropriate conditions for people’s assessors and juries. The crucial point is to draw up the lists of and fix the salaries for people’s assessors and jurors.

It is planned to institute judicial police in order to maintain public order in the courtroom, prevent contempt of court, guard the court premises, and protect those participating in a trial.

According to Mr. Kotorobai, insufficient funding is the No. 1 obstacle to implementing the judicial system law. To be more exact, this requires over UAH 1 billion, while only 97 million have been allotted. This can be explained, in the opinion of Ms. Yemelianova, by the fact that this year’s state budget was adopted in 2001, while the judicial system law was passed only on February 7, 2002. In other words, the budget has no articles to finance the reform because “who could imagine that the law would be passed so soon?”

Lack of adequate funding, absence of the needed logistical basis, and relatively low salaries are by no means conducive to the attraction of highly trained staff, which can greatly jeopardize the administration of justice. Nevertheless, professional cadres will be trained as before, and the reform even envisages improvement of the training system. One of the innovations is the office of assistant judge: a person occupying this post will acquire tremendous work experience and later become a full judge. Moreover, assistant judges are supposed to ease the load on full judges who have been overburdened lately with such things as traffic offenses. Hence, full judges will have more time to update their own skills and handle more important cases, Mr. Yurchenko pointed out.

And, finally, there is the problem of revising and bringing the current law into line with the innovations. This can be done in two ways, according to Ms. Yemelianova: either to redraft or to make amendments to the existing procedural, civil, and criminal, codes. The Ministry of Justice has opted to establish task forces to draw up the relevant normative and legal instruments: in other words, both ways are to be tried. However, it is doubtful that Verkhovna Rada will approve the new versions of the codes by December 2002 (suffice it to recall the way the Civil and Criminal Codes were adopted). And with the parliamentary recess only a week away, these issues will be debated only in September.