The significant part of complaints against judges concerns the violation of terms of consideration of court cases. Despite the objectively big workload on the first instance judges, they are often brought to responsibility. For instance, the HCJ
punished the judge of Kyiv District Administrative Court Kostenko D., who had been considering the lawsuit during 14 months.
However, there is completely different approach to judges of the Supreme Court, whose workload is not bigger than in courts of the first instance, and whose working conditions and bonuses are much better. In particular, the HCJ refused to even open proceeding against judges of the Administrative Court of Cassation (headed by Bevzenko), who did not hold the single meeting regarding the cassation appeal filed in September 2017 in the top case concerning elections of the Public Council within the NABU. There were
no violations in the fact that the head of the Administrative Court of Cassation Mykhaylo Smokovych had been considering the cassation appeal seven times longer than required by the law. By the way, the defendant in this case was District Administrative Court of Kyiv.
The HCJ is very selective in punishing judges for ungrounded search warrants. For instance, the HCJ brought to responsibility judges
Samsonova O.,
Pysanets V., and
Radchykova O.. However, it
refused twice without any justification at least to open proceeding against
Konstantinova (Tarasyuk) K.E., the judge of Pechersk District Court of Kyiv. She made completely illegal and ungrounded decision to search the place of Avtomaydan activist after he had recorded
Pervushina O., the head of Holosiyivskyi court in Kyiv, driving the undeclared car.
However, the HCJ illegally
punished the judge Radchenko V. for satisfying the appeal of the NABU detectives to search the place of Pavlo Vovk, the head of Kyiv District Administrative Court. The Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court
declared the HCJ's decision illegal.
On January 15, 2020, the HCJ
brought to responsibility the judge Kryvorot O. for
satisfying the request of the NABU detectives to grant access to telephone traffic to the common-law wife of former deputy head of the Presidential Administration Oleksiy Filatov. By the way, the NABU initiated investigation against the well-known
journalistic investigation regarding influential official of the time of Poroshenko who was in charge of the judicial reform. Detectives had grounds to be interested in traffic, but the HCJ decided that the judge had illegally granted such access.
The judge of Pechersk Court Bilotserkivets O. made completely ungrounded
decision to grant access to telephone traffic of Automaydan activists in the case of "beating with eggs" of the MP Barna O., which has all signs of
persecution. The HCJ even refused to open proceeding against Bilotserkivets O., although his decision is clearly more arbitrary than the decision of the punished by the HCJ Kryvorot O.. It is obvious that essence is not in violations, but in names of persons affected by these decisions.
The very interesting case happened regarding complaints against Valentyn Serdyuk, who was
caught drunk driving on the eve of taking the oath as the judge of the Supreme Court and even was
deprived the right to drive for a year. Activists filed two complaints against him for clear violation of the judicial ethics. But member of the HCJ Svitlana Shelest even refused to
initiate the disciplinary proceeding in August 2019. In December 2019, the Disciplinary Chamber opened proceeding against Serdyuk V. on the ground of similar complaint of Roman Kuybida. The speaker in the case is the same Svitlana Shelest. What changed the position of member of the HCJ so dramatically is the mystery. But it is unlikely that these are requirements of the law.
This shows that the HCJ manually, very selectively and unequally applies the same norms to punish some judges in similar situations and release others from responsibility. Or punish / cover the same judge depending on the situation.