How Ukrainian parliament misled EU on improving judicial oversight and what the consequences may be
On 9 June 2026, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian parliament] adopted Draft Law No. 13165-2 on improving judges' integrity declarations and declarations of judges' family ties.
Under the Ukraine Facility plan, Parliament was supposed to have passed a law by the second quarter of 2025 that would clarify the content of these declarations, extend the review period, introduce more detailed verification mechanisms and establish clear legal consequences.
Why lawmakers finally turned their attention to the issue is no mystery. Nearly €400 million in funding is tied to improving the process for reviewing judges. Moreover, European Commissioner Marta Kos, who visited Kyiv shortly beforehand, specifically urged Parliament not to jeopardise these funds and to finally take this step.
Read more about how Parliament, under the guise of a European integration law, adopted legislation that actually moves Ukraine further away from the EU, democracy and the rule of law in the article by Mykhailo Zhernakov and Tetiana Shevchuk: A 'European' simulation of reform: how concessions to the EU are killing the chance to clean up the Supreme Court.
Every year since 2016, judges have been required to submit an integrity declaration. This is a special questionnaire in which a judge confirms, for example, that they live within their declared income, have not issued rulings while facing a conflict of interest and have not attempted to obtain Russian citizenship.
If a review reveals that any of these statements are false, the judge is supposed to be held accountable (although the sanctions currently available are far from severe).
In practice, however, no one has been punished for false statements in integrity declarations during the past ten years.
The loophole allowing dishonest judges to escape responsibility is embedded in the law itself. Liability exists only for the intentional submission of false information, and proving intent, as opposed to mere error or forgetfulness, is legally almost impossible. Even in the rare cases where intent was established, judges generally received nothing more than a warning or the loss of salary bonuses for one month – not exactly a powerful incentive to change their behavior.
This is why the demand emerged to "fix" the integrity declaration review mechanism.
To do so, lawmakers needed to introduce liability for gross negligence when completing declarations, extend the maximum review period so that all relevant circumstances could be examined and strengthen sanctions to make dismissal of a judge a realistic possibility.
In addition, and this is particularly important under current conditions, international experts should be temporarily involved in reviewing judges of the highest judicial instance, namely the Supreme Court.
All of these requirements are reflected in the Ukraine Facility plan, the Rule of Law Roadmap, the Kachka–Kos list of priority reforms for 2026 and the EU accession benchmarks under Chapter 23.
Instead of improving the bill, however, members of Parliament voted to remove half of the questions from the declarations and make the review of the remaining provisions effectively meaningless.
This is not the first time that Ukrainian authorities have committed themselves to a reform only to exploit ambiguities in the requirements or other circumstances in order to replace genuine reform with imitation.
But this represents a new level of falsification of a supposedly "European" law.
Lawmakers ignored the fairly detailed requirements set out by the EU and adopted legislation that directly contradicts its title and produces the opposite effect.
In other words, the authorities effectively "sold" their partners the title of the bill instead of its actual substance. One often hears the counterargument that insisting too strongly on reforms could harm the Ukrainian state. Yet the reality is the opposite.
The law on integrity declarations can still be corrected.
This is not a choice between supporting Ukraine and criticising it. It is a choice between supporting genuine reforms and accepting their imitation.
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- June, 22
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23 of June 2026
