No malicious intent in HACC judge appointment delays that cut Ukraine's macro-aid - court chief of staff
There are no facts or grounds to claim that Ukraine's failure to fulfill the condition under the Ukraine Facility plan – the failure to appoint judges to the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) – was intentional. The competition had a number of organizational errors and miscalculations, the court's chief of staff, Bohdan Kryklyvenko, has said.
"We have no facts or grounds to claim that this was some kind of deliberate sabotage - this is a series of organizational errors and miscalculations," Kryklyvenko said in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
Commenting on the words of Economy Minister Oleksiy Sobolev that due to the complexity of the procedure approved by the Court, only two out of 25 judges were recruited, although there were 200 participants, the head of the Court's staff explained that the Supreme Judicial Council, like any other court in Ukraine, was not involved in the competition.
"The Supreme Judicial Council asked to fill the vacancies and waited for these vacancies to be filled. "The Court did not participate in any way either in approving the rules of procedure and procedures for competitive selection, nor, even more so, in its conduct," Kryklyvenko emphasized.
The head of the Court's staff added that for the renewed High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ), the competition for the selection of judges of the HCJ was the first. "The first pancake turned out to be a mess," Kryklyvenko said.
"That is, there were a number of factors that coincided in time and led to such a result. This is a very complex multi-stage process. And it turned out that way without malicious intent. At least we think so, because there is no reason to think otherwise," he noted.
The head of the Supreme Judicial Council's staff said that the bulk of the candidates did not "get" from the HQCJ to the Supreme Judicial Council: only two candidates remained out of 261 who submitted documents at the start of the competition. "Objectively: it was not the Supreme Judicial Council or the Office of the President who "cut them off", it was the candidates who were "sifted" at several stages in the HQCJ," he emphasized.
According to Kryklyvenko, the following adjustments have been made to the upcoming competition, in particular: the passing score for cognitive tests has been lowered, the procedure for the practical task has been changed.
"Currently, many agree that the methodology was irrelevant to the conditions and goals that were set within the framework of this competitive selection," the head of the Court's staff added.
"This is an extremely serious problem, because Ukraine has not received a very serious financial resource. "This is a huge amount of macro-aid to the state budget, but believe me, all the judges, the Supreme Judicial Council as a whole as an institution, were the first to be interested in the earliest possible appointment of these judges," Kryklyvenko said.