CrimeaWatch has completed research, verification, and instance documentation for 33 decisions of Ukraine’s High Qualification Commission of Judges (Вища кваліфікаційна комісія суддів, ВККС) in which the Commission’s own panels treated a judge’s or judicial candidate’s connection to occupied Crimea as material to a qualification or disciplinary assessment. The decisions span two separate Commission compositions and nearly a decade — from June 2017 to July 2026. Individual profiles for all 34 identified panel members, and an institutional profile of the Commission itself, are in final review and will publish on this site in the coming days.

Beginning September 3, 2026, CrimeaWatch formally contacted twelve organizations newly documented on this site as having taken part in forming the Public Integrity Council. Each received the specific facts recorded about it — the decisions of the High Qualification Commission of Judges that admitted it, the compositions it staffed, its delegates by name — and five calendar days to respond before the record is treated as final. For two further organizations no contact channel could be established, and this post states that plainly rather than recording them as having declined to comment.

Twenty-three civic organizations have taken part in forming Ukraine’s Public Integrity Council since its creation in 2016. Four of them — the Ukrainian Bar Association, Transparency International Ukraine, the Nova Kraina Civic Platform and the DEJURE Foundation — have delegated members to all four compositions without a single gap. CrimeaWatch publishes the complete registry below, compiled from the Council’s own composition rosters and from the published decisions of the High Qualification Commission of Judges that admit organizations to the assemblies forming it.

Beginning August 31, 2026, CrimeaWatch formally contacted all 40 organizations currently documented in its Entities section — every law firm, media outlet, advocacy group, and civic organization whose institutional conduct is recorded on this site in connection with the Public Integrity Council’s Crimea-recognition methodology. Each organization received the full text of its published profile and five calendar days to respond before that record is treated as final.

This is not a courtesy extended at our discretion. It is methodology, applied without exception, to every entity this site names.

CrimeaWatch has completed the systematic review of every conclusion issued by Ukraine’s Public Integrity Council (PIC) from the body’s establishment through May 5, 2026. Alongside this analysis, we have published 55 new individual profiles of PIC members across the first, second, and third compositions, and 40 new organizational profiles documenting the PIC itself and the civic and professional bodies that delegated members to it. This is the largest single expansion of the CrimeaWatch register since the project began.

CrimeaWatch has completed the research, verification, and profiling of all 22 members of the Public Integrity Council (PIC) second composition (2018–2021). This marks the first major milestone in our documentation of how Ukrainian civil society institutions institutionalized the treatment of Crimea as Russian-controlled territory in their procedural frameworks.

What the PIC Is and Why It Matters#

The Public Integrity Council (Громадська рада доброчесності, ГРД) is a civil society body established under Ukraine’s 2016 judicial reform legislation. Its mandate was to assess whether judicial candidates and sitting judges met standards of integrity and professional ethics. PIC conclusions — while formally advisory — carried significant institutional weight: a negative finding could effectively block a candidate’s appointment or promotion within Ukraine’s reformed judiciary.