Authorship of PIC Practice Summary Treating Visits to Occupied Crimea as Equivalent to Visits to the Russian Federation

What Happened#

In 2018, the Public Integrity Council published an official summary of its practice in assessing candidates for the Supreme Court of Ukraine. The document was produced within a project implemented by the DEJURE Foundation with support from the International Renaissance Foundation. Halyna Chyzhyk is named on the document’s colophon as its general editor, identified by title as co-coordinator of the Public Integrity Council.

The document systematized 134 PIC conclusions on judicial candidate non-compliance, organizing findings under six criteria drawn from the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct: independence, impartiality, integrity and incorruptibility, adherence to ethical norms, equality, and competence and diligence.

Under the criterion of Independence, the structural table lists as a single, undivided violation indicator:

Visits to the Russian Federation and to temporarily occupied territories.

Six Supreme Court candidates — Holiashkin, Drobotova, Prokopanych, Domuschi, Kalinichenko, and Simonenko — are identified as having violated this indicator.

The Analytical Commentary#

The document’s explanatory text (pp. 10–11) provides the following reasoning for this indicator:

The facts of judges repeatedly visiting the aggressor state and the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea were reflected in the conclusions regarding Holiashkin, Drobotova, Prokopanych, Domuschi, Kalinichenko, and Simonenko. From the perspective of a reasonable person, an individual holding the position of a judge should have refrained from such trips in order to preclude any suspicion that such a person coordinates their actions with representatives of the Russian Federation and receives from them security guarantees for themselves and members of their family.

This reasoning is significant in two respects. First, it names Crimea and the Russian Federation in a single explanatory clause, treating them interchangeably as spaces where a judge might encounter Russian state actors. Second, the very logic of the argument — that visiting Crimea gives rise to suspicion of coordination with Russian Federation representatives — is only coherent on the premise that Crimea is under Russian administrative control. The text does not draw a distinction between the aggressor state and the occupied Ukrainian territory; it reasons as though they constitute a single threat environment under Russian authority.

Context#

The PIC was established in 2016 as a civic body mandated to assist the High Qualifications Commission of Ukraine in vetting judges. Its integrity indicators were not advisory opinions but operational tools applied in the assessment of 381 candidates during the Supreme Court competition of 2016–2017.

The 2018 publication was an explicit methodological document — a formalization and public record of the criteria the PIC had actually applied, intended as a reference for future work. As such, the Crimea-Russia equivalence it encodes was not rhetorical: it had already been applied against named judges in concluded proceedings, and the document was designed to guide future assessments.

Chyzhyk’s role as general editor situates her not as one voice among many but as the person responsible for the document’s final form. The framing, structure, and analytical language of the publication — including the unified Russia/Crimea indicator and the explanatory commentary reasoning about Russian state contacts — were published under her editorial authority.

Relationship to the December 16, 2020 Instance#

This 2018 document predates the formal vote of December 16, 2020, at which Chyzhyk was one of 15 members who unanimously adopted updated Indicators encoding the same equivalence. The 2018 publication documents that the Crimea-Russia equivalence was not an anomaly introduced in 2020, but a methodological position Chyzhyk had already helped to formalize and publicly defend two years earlier, in her capacity as co-coordinator and editorial authority of the PIC’s official practice summary.

Verification#

• Official PIC/DEJURE Foundation publication, 2018.
• Colophon identifies Halyna Chyzhyk as general editor by name and title.
• Document content cross-verified against structural table (p. 4) and analytical commentary (pp. 10–11).