Practice Generalization
Summarizing and systematizing HCJ disciplinary practice, establishing clear standards for assessing judicial conduct, boundaries of judicial discretion, consistency of liability criteria, and predictability of disciplinary procedures.
Consistency of disciplinary practice
Why the HCJ reviews its own practice and who worked on it
One of the High Council of Justice’s important functions is to ensure the consistency of disciplinary practice: in identical circumstances a judge should be able to foresee how their conduct will be assessed, and a complainant should know what to expect. That is why the HCJ produces an annual review of its own disciplinary practice — that of the Disciplinary Chambers and that of the plenary review of their decisions.
I was a member of the working group on generalising disciplinary practice concerning judges, chaired by Alla Kotelevets. Our work produced these annual reviews, published each year together with presentations summarising them.
Annual reviews
Documents published on the HCJ website, by year of publication
- 2026 for 2025
- Review of HCJ practice in reviewing Disciplinary Chamber decisions in 2025
- 2025 for 2024
- Review of the Disciplinary Chambers’ practice in disciplinary cases against judges in 2024
- Review of HCJ practice in reviewing Disciplinary Chamber decisions in 2024
- Review of practice on leaving disciplinary complaints without consideration and refusing to open disciplinary cases in 2024
- Presentations for each review, plus the presentation “Substantial disciplinary misconduct of a judge”
- 2024 for 2023
- Review of the Disciplinary Chambers’ practice in disciplinary cases against judges in 2023
- Review of HCJ practice in reviewing Disciplinary Chamber decisions in 2023
- Review of practice on refusing to open disciplinary cases against judges in 2023
- 2023 for 2017–2021
- Review of practice in disciplinary cases against judges considered by the HCJ and its disciplinary bodies (cases of 2017–2021), including an English-language version
- Review of HCJ practice on complaints against decisions in disciplinary proceedings concerning prosecutors
AI for the preparatory work
An HCJ and BRDO pilot: a tool for the initial analysis of disciplinary decisions
Each year the HCJ issues a large number of Disciplinary Chamber rulings and decisions, plus decisions on their review, so the preparatory work for the practice review consumes most of the specialists’ time. In 2026 we used artificial intelligence for it for the first time: together with BRDO and the disciplinary inspectors’ service we built and tested such a tool during a three-month pilot project.
What the tool does:
- collects new public rulings and decisions of the Disciplinary Chambers and the HCJ every day;
- structures the data on the judge, the court, the circumstances of the case, the ground for disciplinary liability under Article 106 of the Law and the type of sanction;
- links documents belonging to the same disciplinary case by complaint number and produces an initial summary of the decision with its key conclusions;
- allows decision cards to be searched and filtered by judge, court, date, chamber, ground and type of sanction.
The demo covers all Disciplinary Chamber decisions issued since 3 November 2025, with data-extraction accuracy of about 93%. The tool was refined after two rounds of testing by disciplinary inspectors and secretariat staff, and its code is open.
AI does not replace professional judgement: it takes over the collection and initial structuring of information, while the analysis and conclusions remain with the HCJ’s specialists. After the pilot the solution is ready to be deployed on the HCJ’s own infrastructure, which in future will allow regular reviews and digests of disciplinary practice to be automated.