The Supreme Court overturned more than half of the court decisions made by the High Anti-Corruption Court based on cassation appeals considered during 2020-2023 (including March).
The relevant data was provided by the Department of Analytical and Legal Work of the Supreme Court in response to the request of the lawyer Volodymyr Bogatyr (letter of the Supreme Court dated March 29, 2023 No. 97/0/18-23 is at the disposal of the editors).
Since VAKS started its work in September 2019, the Supreme Court did not have time to consider the merits of any proceedings that year. But, starting from 2020 and until now, according to the data of the automated system of record keeping of the Supreme Court, a total of 55 decisions have been issued. Of these, 26 VACS decisions were left unchanged, 1 decision was changed; canceled – 28 (full data are given in the table).
“The situation when the highest judicial body cancels more than half of court decisions cannot be considered acceptable. In order to understand the scale of the problem, it is worth noting that, for example, for district court judges, a figure of about 1% of overturned decisions is considered the norm, – V. Bogatyr commented on the response of the Supreme Court to his request. – An excessively high rate of “failure” in the work of an average judge usually raises questions in the case of his transfer or during qualification procedures. And canceling half of the decisions would definitely lead to the initiation of dismissal”.
“Under such conditions, a dialectical question arises. Either the corrupt Supreme Court cancels the fair decisions of the Supreme Court (which is impossible to even think about after the reforms and transformations), or the cassation instance corrects the unprofessional and illegal decisions made by the specialized court (which should also be unlikely, given the seemingly careful selection of judges). So, the eternal question arises who is to blame and what to do? In the newly created courts, an objective dialectical connection and continuity between what was denied and why the reforms were carried out and the actual results of the reforms themselves was revealed. It is obvious that the process of formation of the newly created courts has gone through a certain cycle and resulted in the result of its predecessors”said the lawyer.
The tasks of the High Anti-Corruption Court are:
- administration of justice for the purpose of protecting the person, society and the state from corruption and related criminal offenses and judicial control over the pre-trial investigation of these criminal offenses, observance of the rights, freedoms and interests of persons in criminal proceedings;
- resolution of the issue of recognition of assets as unsubstantiated and their collection into state income in cases provided for by law, in civil proceedings;
- administration of justice in cases involving the application of the sanction provided for in Clause 1-1 of Part 1 of Article 4 of the Law “On Sanctions”, in the order of administrative proceedings.
