In the past few years, there has been an unspoken confrontation in Ukraine between certain law enforcement agencies and judges of the District Administrative Court of Kyiv (DACK), which considers disputes between citizens and representatives or senior officials of government bodies, including law-enforcement agencies.

The law-enforcement agencies initiate criminal proceedings, use operative, technical and other special possibilities, including high-profile information campaigns, against the court. The purpose of these actions is to discredit the court and restrict the possibility to administer justice by its judges. As a result, the principled stance of the court in consideration of disputes between citizens and law-enforcement agencies has served as grounds for such heightened attention on part of the law enforcers.

Within one of the criminal proceedings, the prosecutor’s office initiated a motion to remove the judges of the DACK from administering justice filed with the Supreme Council of Justice, a disciplinary body dealing with judges and public prosecutors. A similar motion on the same grounds and documents, but in the different proceedings, was filed by the prosecutor’s office in 2019, but was rejected by the SCJ as groundless.