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Integration into the European Union declared by the political elites of Ukraine means, first of all, the establishment of those ideas, values and standards in the Ukrainian society that form the foundation of the centuries-long period of formation and state-of-art development of many European democracies, primarily – of Western pattern. It means the recognition of a human-being as the highest value, whose rights and freedoms protection is a major dedication in activity of a state.
In order to achieve this goal in country such a system of justice should function that would be able to ensure: fair public justice; easily accessible and high quality legal services; prevention and response to corruption in all society layers and at all levels of power.
At the beginning of 2006 the employees of the Ministry of Justice made an attempt to analyze the performance of the Ukrainian system of justice in general and to determine the main principles for its improvement and reforming, that was reflected in the first part of this publication - “White Book: informational report and analysis of the problems in the system of justice”.
As indicated in White Book, the mission of the Ministry is to ensure the provision of the national policy in its determined area in order to sustain the democratic development of the society based on such system of normative and institutional mechanisms that will provide efficient implementation of supremacy of law principle into the operation of state power and local self-governance bodies in accordance with the European standards.
White Book presents the problems, that still take place not only in the system of the Ministry of Justice and its subordinate bodies, but also in the areas much broader, without reforming of which it will be impossible to achieve free and democratic development of the Ukrainian society. These areas include:
- Judicial system;
- Penitentiary system;
- Advocateship;
- Notariat;
- Law-enforcement bodies;
- Law education.
According to the outcomes of the conducted analysis those main challenges were detected, the solution of which is considered to be the guarantee of achieving the goals set for the Ministry of Justice. In particular they include:
- Low quality of draft laws and other normative and legal acts, which is in many cases conditioned by the lack of qualified staffs and single imperative rules for law drafting;
- Availability of complicated registration procedures and limited access to the information about such procedures for citizens;
- Irrelevant effectiveness level of the judicial system, which mostly still does not ensure fair public justice;
- Out-of-date and non-reformed institution of advocateship that does not correspond to European standards;
- Incomplete reforming of the notariat institution and low quality of notarial services;
- Lack of efficient legal assistance system accessible for all citizens;
- Non-reformed institution of procuracy and other bodies that are dedicated to the provision of legal order according to the European standards;
- Incompliance of investigation procedure with the principles of the European standards;
- Untimely and inefficient fulfillment of judicial decisions;
- Insufficient level of providing public access to the laws and other normative acts;
- Ineffective provision of property rights protection;
- Non-reformed system of law education;
- Lack of efficient mechanisms of public opinion consideration in the work of justice bodies system.
“Green Book” – “Strategy of justice system development in Ukraine” – provides recommendations on solving the indicated challenges and other problems in the system of justice.
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