Being introduced in late 2012, the new Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) of Ukraine contains many pitfalls in terms of practical implementation and needs significant improvements. This is evidenced by the numerous appeals sent to the Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsperson). To identify existing problems in the Criminal Procedure Code, Ukrainian Ombudsperson Valeria Lutkovska initiated court monitoring to assess CPC implementation in Ukraine with the support of the Council of Europe, the US Embassy in Ukraine, and UNDP in Ukraine.

 

As part of this initiative, observation of randomly selected court proceedings was conducted. Independent civic monitors attended trials, while observing the main procedural aspects. Civic monitors did not interfere in the course of a trial, but only recorded such moments as, for example, the presence of lawyer or interpreter at hearings in the event defendants lacked Ukrainian language capacity, or timely appearance of participants in the court, and others.

 

Monitoring of court proceedings was conducted by the Institute of Applied Humanitarian Research through the observation method, aimed to obtain data by trained observers commissioned to record certain facts during the trial (behaviour of trial participants, other circumstances in the course of a court session, etc.) guided by a custom-designed questionnaire - a list of indicators (questions).

 

In Kyiv courts, such monitoring helped determine the actual implementation status of the new Criminal Procedure Code and provide relevant information to contribute to further improvement of the human rights protection mechanisms of the Office of the Ombudsperson.

 

During the meeting, main findings and first conclusions on the implementation of the new procedure code stemming from the results in Kyiv courts monitoring were presented. Currently, the monitoring report is being further improved and will be published by the end of July.