Anti-Corruption Efforts Risk Paralyzing Ukraine’s Court System

KYIV, UKRAINE — Over the decade since pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych fell in 2014, Ukrainian lawmakers have struggled to reform a corrupt judicial system. A slew of anti-corruption bodies has been created, among them the Public Integrity Council, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the High Council of Justice and others.

The scale of the problem is vast. One 2020 analysis by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, compared the judiciary to a criminal syndicate.

There has been progress. In 2024 alone, 48 judges were dismissed on various charges, including collusion with the Russians. In May 2023, the head of the Supreme Court was arrested, accused of taking a $2.7 million bribe. Last year, Judge Larysa Bohomolova from the Berdyansk District Court on the Sea of Azov coast was dismissed by the Council of Justice for sending sensitive military information to the Russian government. Two hundred miles to the west, in the Black Sea port of Kherson, another judge who was also suspected of working for the Russians, Natalia Sharko, was dismissed for violating judicial disciplinary codes.

The High Council of Justice is central to these efforts. It created the investigation system to be accessible, to ensure that allegations against judges are heard from across the spectrum of Ukrainian society.

But that accessibility, critics say, is too easy to abuse. There’s now a backlog of more than 13,000 complaints against the country’s system of roughly 4,400 judges. Some complaints are serious, such as those alleging treason or high-level corruption. But others are petty or focus on issues that are outside a judge’s purview. According to one complaint, a judge refused to delay the start of a court hearing when someone was late. Another complainant sought to hold a judge responsible for a city administration’s delay in turning on his heating and hot water services.

In late 2024, the council created the Service of Disciplinary Inspectors to investigate the complaints in that queue, to which about two dozen complaints are added every day. But the division employs just 18 inspectors, who say they each make it through about one complaint per day.

Vitaliy Salikhov, the former acting head of the High Council of Justice, says the goal of many complaints is to exert pressure on judges or create grounds for a judge’s recusal. The law is written in such a way that charges can be brought for almost any formal shortcoming — from a simple remark to delays in drafting a ruling, he says. This creates an atmosphere of “infinite paralysis,” he says, where “judges are cornered and afraid to make any decisions.”

The process of filing complaints is so lax that it’s become a profitable business, Salikhov adds.

Dozens of people file complaints en masse, he says, for a small payout, usually of just a few hundred United States dollars, from people who want complaints filed, just not in their names.

“We keep seeing the same surnames over and over again,” Salikhov says.

In one case, a complaint was filed on the allegation that the judge had used profanity during a court hearing. Inspectors discovered that the name listed on the complaint was that of someone who had died months prior.

“We call these ‘grave complaints,’” says one inspector, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.

Other cases are serious, but not directly related to the war or corruption. In June 2023, a judge was accused of hitting a pedestrian while driving drunk. The High Council didn’t rule on whether the judge was guilty of a crime — that verdict would need to be decided by a criminal court. But the council did determine that the judge’s behavior on the night of the incident undermined the authority of the court, and dismissed him from his post.

“Conscientious judges fear not only being rightfully held accountable for their actions, but also being subjected to illegitimate punishment disguised as legal procedure — meaning the use of seemingly legitimate procedural tools that are actually illegal,” says Oleh Yurkiv, a judge in Halytskyi District Court in the western city of Lviv.

Roman Maselko, a member of the High Council of Justice, says that many dismissals of legitimately treasonous or corrupt judges wouldn’t have happened if only people directly affected by a judge’s actions were allowed to file a complaint. Even so, he says, allowing activist organizations to file complaints overburdens the system. Those organizations should be allowed to only support individuals who want to file complaints, and not file them on anyone’s behalf, he says.

For now, the court’s complaint system creates its own dysfunction, says Markiyan Halabala, a judge at Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court.

“Many fellow judges are afraid to make decisions because a judge ends up with an enemy in the form of the party that disagrees with the ruling,” he says.