Research project on analysis of jurisprudence on the protection of the rights of persons residing in the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions not controlled by Ukraine (with the support of the OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine)

In total, more than 500 court decisions (available in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions in the public domain) were analyzed. Among them, we identified 60, which, although cannot be considered a full-fledged sociological sample, in our opinion, generally demonstrate trends in the protection of human rights and the rule of law in a number of areas that are relevant to the extraordinary situation in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In particular, it concerns the establishment of legal facts relevant to the protection of property rights, primarily inheritance; exercise of property rights; business; education, etc. As the analysis of jurisprudence has shown, the most widespread and relevant for the extraordinary situation in Donetsk and Luhansk regions are the areas of civil registration and social protection.

One of the most important conclusions of the research is that the judicial practice related to the protection of human rights and ensuring (observance of) the rule of law in relation to Ukrainian citizens – internally displaced persons and persons residing in the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions not controlled by Ukraine – demonstrates a generally fairly prompt responsiveness in the consideration of the relevant categories of cases. This aspect is very important in view of the systemic problem of violation of procedural deadlines in other categories of cases in Ukrainian courts.

While recognizing the positive tendencies in this area, it should be noted that the level of reasoning (argumentation) in court decisions is far from uniform and varies significantly. At the same time, there are no regional differences in this regard. There are decisions that satisfy the claims, but their reasoning does not contain the fact of evidence evaluation, or vice versa, the judge’s absolutely correct and not trivial argumentation in favor of the plaintiff leads to the opposite conclusion than one might expect. These approaches are inconsistent with the principle of the rule of law, in particular with its legal certainty component.