On May 20, 2019, the results of the study “Statistical analysis of court decisions in criminal cases related to corruption”(2014-2018, 36 410 court decisions) were presented at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center (UKMC).
The research was conducted with the support of the USAID New Justice Program by the Ukrainian Center for Social Data in partnership with the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law under the project “Changes in the Judicial System of Ukraine: Statistical Analysis of Court Decisions.”
The Unified State Register of Court Decisions is a vast array of information that can be converted into data and analyzed statistically. And that analysis can show if there are any changes in the judiciary.
The following articles of the Criminal Code were taken into account in the study of court decisions in criminal cases related to corruption:
- Art. 366-1 of the Criminal Code “Declaration of inaccurate information”
- Art. 368 “Acceptance of an offer, promise or receipt of illegal benefit by an official”
- Art. 368-2 “Illegal enrichment”
- Art. 369 “Offer, promise or provision of improper benefit to an official”
- Art. 369-2 “Abuse of authority”.
4280 final decisions were found in the original jurisdiction and 1466 in the appeal for all categories.
Despite numerous amendments to the anti-corruption legislation to strengthen the fight against corruption, in judicial practice there are not very strict approaches to the fight against corruption, in particular:
- increase in the number of fines imposed;
- reduction of the number of imprisonment;
- increasing the number of acquittals and exemptions from criminal liability;
- relatively low share of confiscation or special confiscation in corruption cases.
At the same time, the size of the illegal benefit (bribe) practically does not correspond to the size of the imposed fines. For a relatively small bribe you can get a large fine, and for a huge bribe – a relatively small fine. During 2014-2018, UAH 36,148,607 fines were imposed in the original jurisdiction.
If there is no correlation between the size of the bribe and the size of the fine, then for real terms of imprisonment there is some dependence – the greater the amount of illicit gain, the longer the term of imprisonment can be obtained.
The full report is available for download here(UKR), the dataset on which the analysis was based is here.