High Specialized Court opens the way for extraordinary review of administrative offence rulings

In the Case of Larisa Karpenko, the High Specialized Court on Civil and Criminal Cases has considered her application and allowed review by the Supreme Court of the rulings imposing administrative penalties.

On 21 October 2010 the European Court of Human Rights in the Case of Kornev and Karpenko vs. Ukraine found that in examining the case regarding administrative offences, Article 6 of the Convention on Human Rights had been violated with respect to Ms Karpenko.  The question then arose how the European Court’s judgment could be implemented since in the Code of Administrative Offences there is no procedure on exceptional reviews of rulings. The Centre for Strategic Defence sent an application for review to the Supreme Court referring to Article 10 of the Law on Implementing Judgments of the European Court and Article 38 of the Law on the Judicial System and Status of Judges which envisages that the Supreme Court shall review cases in a situation where an international judicial body has established that Ukraine violated its international obligations in court resolution of a case.  The Supreme Court however refused to examine the case.

An application was at the same time made to the High Specialized Court which determined that the case should be given for re-examination by the Supreme Court on the basis of Article 400 – 12 § 1.2 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

The Court used an analogy with the procedure envisaged for review of rulings on criminal cases, relying on the concept of “criminal charge” developed by the European Court of Human Rights.