Members of the High Qualification Commission of Judges of Ukraine Ruslan Melnyk, Vitalii Hatseliuk and Oleh Koliush took part in the IX Lviv Criminal Justice Forum (hereinafter – the Forum) held on 27-28 October 2023 in Lviv with the support of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Co-organizers were also the State Bureau of Investigation and Lviv State University of Internal Affairs.
This year’s Forum was dedicated to the topic “Ukrainian Military and Post-War Criminal Justice”, within the framework of which current important issues were discussed: comparison of international and national criminal law related to war and peace; challenging aspects of investigating criminal offences under the jurisdiction of the SBI in a martial law condition; critical infrastructure as an object of military aggression and peculiarities of preliminary investigation of attacks on critical infrastructure, etc.
In particular, members of the Commission joined to moderation of certain panel discussions, and also together with the Deputy Chairman of the High Council of Justice, Dmytro Lukianov, and the Head of the National Mediation and Reconciliation Service, Dmytro Kukhnyuk, participated in a specialized expert discussion called “The capacity of the judiciary system and access to justice: wartime challenges”. Together with other participants, including scholars and judges, they discussed a number of issues concerned with the functioning of the HCJ and the HQCJ, as well as ways of coping with the challenges faced by the judicial governance bodies and the judiciary system in general (including judges’ secondments, competitions already announced by the Commission, completion of qualification evaluation procedures, etc.)
You may watch the video recording of the first and second days of the Forum on the OSCE YouTube channel.
It should be recalled that the initiative to establish the Forum was taken by the Ukrainian expert community and is a logical continuation of the events held in 2011-2015 in Lviv region on criminal justice issues. Leading Ukrainian experts and legal professionals proposed the introduction of a regular Forum as an international event on criminal justice reform and the creation of a nation-wide network of experts and researchers in this field.
