In summer 2019, NABU detectives and officials from the General Prosecutor’s Office searched the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court. While the search was under way, NABU director Artem Sytnik and Serhiy Horbatyuk – then head of special investigations at the General Prosecutor’s Office – released covert audio recordings of conversations between court officials, at a joint press conference.
The tapes allegedly show judges at the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court discussing plans to issue unjust court decisions and interfere with the work of the High Qualification Commission of Judges, which monitors the country’s judges. The recordings also contain references to Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner on human rights. According to investigators, Denisova helped Vovk place a judge on the qualification commission. Denisova has not commented on these allegations.
In response, the prosecutor’s office charged three judges in the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court – Vovk, Yevhen Ablov and Ihor Pohribnychenko – as well as Ivan Shepitko, a district judge in Odessa, with interfering in the work of state bodies. Speaking at the time, Vovk called the recordings “a lie from beginning to end”. He said the voices on the tapes were similar to those of judges in the administrative court, but that the conversations had been edited out of context.
A month after the revelations in 2019, Vovk, some ten years in the post, resigned, only to take up his position once again this year.
At Zelenskyi’s first major press conference in 2019, journalists asked the new president when he would sign a decree to abolish the court – or whether, like his predecessor Poroshenko, Zelenskyi also needed a “convenient” court.
“I don’t need anybody to be ‘convenient’,” Zelenskyi said at the time. “I’m ready to look into this issue, ready to sign a decree that will help justice, and there’s no question over the Regional Administrative Court […] I haven’t had this issue yet. I haven’t even talked it through with my team. I don’t know what stage this issue is at.”
A little less than a year after Zelenskyi’s statement, NABU published new covert recordings of conversations among the court’s judges. The new recordings, which were released in July 2020, allegedly contain conversations about influencing judges on Ukraine’s Constitutional and Supreme Courts, as well as members of NABU, the High Qualification Commission of Judges, the State Bureau of Investigation and the police.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office have since charged Vovk and his deputy Ablov again, as well as five other judges of the court. According to the investigation, these judges are part of a “criminal organisation” that has “issued court decisions in their own interests, as well as the interests of political elites and business circles”. In particular, the investigators claimed that “the head of the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court used a scheme to file artificial and fabricated administrative cases to his own court from fake civic organisations and individuals”. These cases were then, according to NABU investigators, “examined very quickly and with a predetermined result.”
Vovk has denied these new allegations. “If we talk about law, and not about politics, then we should note that these new charges are based on the same facts as a year ago,” he wrote on Facebook in July. “These facts have already been assessed. Forensic analyses prove that these tapes have been fabricated. All conceivable norms of the Criminal Procedural Code have been violated.”
In a media interview, Vovk went on to say that the tapes “are revenge for the fact that the Regional Administrative Court is independent”, and that the court is “one of the bastions of independence in the judicial branch”. He also stated that Artem Sytnyk, director of NABU, is involved in several criminal cases under consideration at the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court and “these decisions are painful for him”. In October, the court approved a decision to fire Sytnyk from his post at NABU, though the Ministry of Justice has said it will not carry out the decision.
Zhernakov, of the DEJURE Foundation, told openDemocracy that if the court is abolished, some of its cases will be referred to the Supreme Court of Ukraine. “The only way to remove these judges from their posts is to liquidate this court,” he says. “The only person who can do this is Zelenskyi, under the constitution. [Yet] he doesn’t do it.”
“Deeply-rooted corruption”
In July this year, a public petition demanding the court be shut down appeared on the website of the Ukrainian President’s Office. Its authors argued that the court had “lost its authority” and that the recordings were evidence of “deeply-rooted corruption”. The petition attracted the required number of signatures to prompt an official response; in October, Zelenskyi announced that he had issued instructions to begin “appropriate consultations with Ukraine’s Supreme Council of Justice to obtain the position of the constitutional body of judicial management.”
There are reasons to believe this process may not be entirely reliable. The Supreme Council of Justice – not to be confused with the High Qualification Commission of Judges – also appears in the NABU tapes. According to the investigation, the judges of the Kyiv Regional Administrative Court have also influenced the work of this body, which advises on the appointment and release of judges.