Today many juridical offices in appellate courts in Ukraine are vacant and it is a big problem. Such situation is the consequence of several reasons. One of them is due to the procedure for appointment to a juridical office in an appellate court that is provided by the current legislation. But practical implementation even of this procedure has been suspended already for several years. Therefore other procedures are offered to solve the problem, which arose, as soon as possible.

The purpose of the article is to define the optimum model of the procedure for appointment to a juridical office in an appellate court and to formulate the practical recommendations.

In addition to the model that is provided by the current legislation at least two other models of the procedure for appointment to a juridical office in an appellate court have been developed. The first of them involves that such person, who has confirmed the ability to administer justice as a judge of the Supreme Court, will be appointed to a juridical office in an appellate court. A similar procedure has been proposed to fill a vacant juridical office in a local court.

The appointment to a juridical office in an appellate court the person who has confirmed the ability to administer justice in the Supreme Court is not without a number of drawbacks. These include: replacement of the requirement for a judge of an appellatecourt with those requirement that apply to a judge of the Supreme Court, possible loss of topicality of information about persons that claim the appointment to a juridical office in an appellate court, conservation the court system in the form it had several (or even many) years ago, further complicating of access to the profession of judge for candidates who have not before participated in competitive procedures.

The purpose of the second of the above mentioned models is temporarily filling a vacant juridical office in an appellate court with a judge of another court. This procedure is also not deprived of imperfections: the number of judges in other courts is not unlimited, in addition to this there is a risk of creating or deepening a personnel crisis in the court whose judge will be sent to an appellate court, and other shortcomings.

A temporary measure aimed at resolving the personnel crisis in appellate courts could be the wider introducing of the appellate review of the case by a single judge (with defining the categories of cases that are reviewed in the collegial composition of the court).

The competition to fill a vacant juridical office in an appellate court announced in 2019 year could solve the problem of deficit of staff in appellate courts. However, this competition will be able to solve the problem only partially. In addition, the procedure itself according to which the competition will be held is no longer perceived as the best of the possible. The procedure should be different: it is more expedient to carry out the selection not separately in each appellate court and in appellate courts of a certain specialization, based on the results of the selection to enroll candidates in the reserve for filling a vacant juridical office in an appellate court, and then among the candidates, enrolled in the reserve, to announce a competition for a vacant juridical office in one or another appellate court.

Bibliography

Websites

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2. Sudebnye riski. ‘Esli sud budet orientirovat’sja na politiku, on perestanet byt’ sudom’, – uveren Aleksej Malovackij, zamestitel’ predsedatelja Vysshego soveta pravosudija. Interv’ju A. Malovackogo “Juridicheskoj praktike”. Vzjal interv’ju A. Nasadjuk (2020) 28–9 (1177-8) Juridicheskaja praktika <https://pravo.ua/articles/sudebnye-riski/> (accessed: 13.04.2022) (in Russian).