Ukraine to pay damages to those improperly dismissed under lustration

Ukrainian courts have ruled in favor of 60 complaints
filed by state prosecutors contesting their dismissal under the 2014 lustration
law, requiring the government to compensate them about UAH 50 mln in damages,
Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova told a parliamentary committee on July 15,
as reported by the Ukrinform news agency. Another 1,006 complaints filed by
dismissed state prosecutors are being reviewed by the courts. Of these cases,
676 plaintiffs are seeking to be reinstated in their positions in the
Prosecutor General’s Office, while 315 are seeking reinstatement in regional
prosecutor offices.

The cabinet will review a new lustration law “in the
nearest future,” Justice Minister Denys Maliuska said in comments to the
Interfax-Ukraine news agency, which were made on June 23 at Ukraine’s
Constitutional Court during its review of the 2014 lustration law. “We have the
European Human Rights Court ruling and the rulings of judges of millions of
damages, if not every month. It’s not an option for us to cause damages to the
state and wait, because it’s better to wait for the Constitutional Court” to
make its ruling, he said. The European Human Rights Court determined in 2019
that Ukraine’s lustration law violated the rights of some of those dismissed.

Zenon Zawada: It’s a
negative development for legislation that was intended to be constructive to
result in such a negative outcome. This is partly the fault of a poorly written
lustration law in Ukraine (enabling dismissed prosecutors to appeal their
dismissals), and partly the result of the 2019 European Human Rights Court
ruling against the lustration law. Though we also can’t rule out possible
corruption in these rulings, without them having been analyzed.

This development reveals that whatever largescale
reforms that are pursued in Ukraine will be actively opposed, and often the reforms
will be limited because the legislation was inadequately drafted. It also
reveals that Ukrainian reform efforts are often hostage to the rulings of E.U.
judges and assessments of its experts, who aren’t familiar or sensitive to the
unique realities and challenges on the ground in Ukraine. So while Western
structures have aided Ukraine in becoming a rule of law society, they are also
responsible for some setbacks because they don’t recognize peculiarities.