Lawyers in Ukraine are not ready for lawyer monopoly, it is premature for Ukraine, Vitaliy Savchuk, a lawyer and adviser to Legal Alliance has said.
“I see the lawyer monopoly premature until at least a few of these questions have been answered in the affirmative. The monopoly should be preceded by serious training for lawyers,” he told Interfax-Ukraine.
According to Savchuk, the lawyer monopoly does not guarantee that the client will receive high-quality legal services.
“When I first started working as a lawyer, I was surprised when I heard from opponents references to norms that had long ceased to be valid. “Are they more unprofessional or unethical?” I asked myself. Some of them were lawyers. The problem of the lawyer monopoly has always been more philosophical than legal,” he said.
Savchuk said that the end consumer, the client, should benefit from the reform of the defense attorneys. At the same time, the lawyer asks a number of questions, in particular, if there is a noticeable increase in the quality of the provision of legal services over the past three or four years, if the bar is effectively protecting lawyers whose rights are violated by the state, if it is really never abusing the powers of the lawyers themselves, and if it guarantees that no one cheats during the lawyer’s exam, and whether the lawyer’s exam is an actual criterion.
“Has the bar of Ukraine become such an institution with strong reputation that every lawyer wants to be a part of it? Of course, the number of lawyers has grown by double-digit percentage over the past two years preceding the introduction of the monopoly. However, it is such an incredible sudden popularity of this status that indicates that far not all lawyers sought to join the bar, they had to join it, and also that a huge percentage of lawyers did not believe in the real benefit of the lawyer’s status, and clients did not trust lawyers because of the lawyer’s certificate,” he said.
Savchuk said that despite the references of “ideologists of the lawyer monopoly in Ukraine to the Western experience,” this experience proves that “the monopoly is not the cause, but the result of many years, or even centuries of evolution of the bar as a guarantor of professionalism and protection of the rights of lawyers from state arbitrariness.”
The lawyer also expressed the opinion that the issue of lawyer monopoly can be resolved without amending the Constitution.
“Even these states, which laws are sometimes called a model, did not solve the issue of monopoly at the level of the Constitution, since for outstanding constitutions, the lawyer monopoly is a too derivative and dependent issue. This issue can be resolved by other laws,” he said.
“Of course, when changes to the Constitution are a matter of a purely parliamentary majority, not law-making technique, then school lunches can be implemented in the Constitution, but I would leave such reforms to one neighboring country,” the lawyer said.
The shareholders of Arsenal Insurance (Kyiv) insurance company at a meeting on June 26 decided to increase the charter capital of the company from UAH 121.5 million to UAH 202.5 million via a closed additional placement of shares.
According to information in the publicly available database of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission of Ukraine, 120,000 shares with a nominal value of UAH 675 per share will be additionally sold for a total of UAH 81 million.
The report also notes that the received financial resources in the form of cash will be placed on current accounts and bank deposits in the ratio of 30% to 70%. The shares of the company, on which the decision on the issue was made, do not provide for the possibility of conversion.
As reported, the company’s shareholders at a meeting on April 24, 2020 considered the issue of increasing the charter capital of the company from UAH 77.4 million to UAH 121.5 million by increasing the nominal value of shares from UAH 430 to UAH 675 (for one ordinary registered share) due to sending part of profit to the charter capital.
Arsenal Insurance is among the top three largest insurance companies in Ukraine and is number one among insurers with Ukrainian capital. Every day the company makes over UAH 2 million of insurance payments. The partners of the Ukrainian company are the leading European reinsurers: HannoverRe, PolishReinsuranceCompany, SCOR SE, Gen.
According to the information on the company’s website, chairman of the board Serhiy Avdeyev owns 24.5% of Arsenal Insurance, Maksym Tuz owns 21%, Kostiantyn Tuz some 9%, Oleksandr Solop holds 17.5%, Anatoliy Solop 12.51%, Hennadiy Moldavsky 9.99%, and Maryna Avdeyeva some 5.5%.
Passengers carried in Jan-Apr of 2020, in MLN
An action group, which consists of human rights activists, journalists, political scientists and other opinion leaders, has stated that it is necessary to replace public representatives in the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG) in Minsk. The action group also said that more effective negotiation platforms could be created if the government does not admit its mistakes.
According to members of the action group, the team of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues sabotaging the Minsk process by creating artificial obstacles for the implementation of his campaign promise to establish peace in Donbas as soon as possible.
Non-transparent appointment of negotiators as representatives of certain districts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions (ORDLO) and obviously secondary dependent people, who do not have enough authority among the internally displaced persons (IDPs), aroused distrust among a major part of the Ukrainian society and absolute non-acceptance among Ukrainian citizens, who live in the non-government controlled territories.
Special attention should be paid to the “background” of the new negotiators which mainly consists of active and intentional actions aimed at deepening the split in the Ukrainian society and discrimination of a part of citizens based on political, territorial and other grounds.
“The negotiations on the settlement of the situation in Donbas will succeed only if people, who are not involved in instigation of war, participate in them,” journalist, representative of NGO Freedom of Speech Center Dmytro Vasylets said.
Doctor of Political Sciences Oleksandr Semchenko said during the press conference that the president’s initiative to include public representatives in the delegation is good. However, the implementation of this initiative by Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Reznikov distorted and discredited the idea. The introduced negotiators are guided exclusively by private political interests and will not do any good.
“It is ordinary citizens who have suffered an unprofessional personnel policy of the President’s Office in first turn and became prisoners of the situation. For example, we are witnessing the fact that representatives of the self-proclaimed republics (Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics) have been unable to agree with the Ukrainian side on the opening of a checkpoint for a long time explaining this by the epidemiological situation. In fact, the reason is on the surface – a political protest caused by categorical non-acceptance of the public representatives in the Ukrainian delegation,” the leader of the Anti-War movement, Viktoria Shylova, said.
“We demand that the president of Ukraine intervene in the situation as soon as possible. It is not a mistake which matters for the system of any state, as everyone makes mistakes, but the response to this mistake. If the newly appointed people (public representatives) aggravate the crisis in the Minsk talks, such people must be replaced immediately. We are awaiting an adequate response of the Ukrainian authorities and, at the same time, in order to not waste time, we are initiating a range of negotiation platforms at both the national and international levels,” lawyer, human rights activists, Head of the Public Council under the Ministry for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine Hennadiy Borysychev.
BORYSYCHEV, REZNIKOV, SEMCHENKO, SHYLOVA, VASYLETS, ZELENSKY
The revocation of lawyer monopoly will oversaturate the legal services market, but will not improve their quality, Head of Omerta Organized Law Group Yevhen Fedoseyev has said.
“The legal market will become even more oversaturated. The activities of a lawyer require adherence to high standards and rules of ethical conduct, which in turn eliminates unethical behavior in the process, which can be observed when a person acting under a power of attorney may abuse procedural rights, disrupt court hearings, and in some cases puts pressure on justice and he is not afraid of disciplinary action,” he said.
The lawyer said that one of the duties of a lawyer is to constantly improve his professional level. At the same time, he said that as a result of the abolition of the lawyer monopoly, “justice will open its doors to a wider circle of people who, due to their financial situation, could not turn to lawyers, but no one has canceled the fact that any lawyer will also not perform work for free.”
“An appeal to a layman who does not know the intricacies of accompanying cases will ultimately cost a lot more,” the lawyer said.
According to Fedoseyev, the introduction of the exclusive right of lawyers to represent interests in court or the so-called lawyer monopoly is an important step for a democratic state, which seeks to effectively and professionally protect the rights and interests of its citizens. In Ukraine, the lawyer monopoly was introduced in 2016 on the basis of a bill amending the Constitution of Ukraine.
“The lawyer monopoly has been building in our country for a long time. Previously, the need for a more professional approach to representation and defense in the courts was not an urgent issue. However, over time and the development of a democratic state, professional and, most importantly, effective defense and representation in courts have become a necessity, since many cases were reviewed only on the basis of the procedural errors in the documents,” he said.
Fedoseyev said that a lawyer is a person who is professionally involved in the defense and representation of citizens in courts, during investigative actions, and similar actions. “Imagine that it’s not doctors, but ordinary amateurs who will treat people. Or someone who wants to entrust a heavy operation to a person who is not a professional in this field? Perhaps this is a rhetorical question,” he said.
The lawyer also suggested that lawyers in criminal cases, who will be affiliated with inexperienced lawyers with whom the participants in the criminal process continue to communicate, may suffer from the abolition of the lawyer monopoly.
“Such “lawyers” in criminal cases will be incompetent to advise parties to criminal proceedings, prepare procedural documents on their behalf and the like. The Institute of Civil Lawyers will also lose a lot, because often only an experienced lawyer can observe ethical standards in civil proceedings, prevent conflicts of interest and “wimping out” of the opponent’s position,” Fedoseyev said.
Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air has announced the launch of flights to five new destinations from Ukraine.
As the airline’s press service said on Tuesday, in particular, from September 1, 2020 it is planned to launch flights from Lviv and Kyiv to Pardubice (the Czech Republic), and from March 2021 from Odesa to Milan (Malpensa), Rome (both starting from 29 March) and Bologna (from March 30).
The cost of a ticket without baggage starts from UAH 579.
As reported, in August 2020, Wizz Air intends to launch flights from Dortmund (Germany) to Zaporizhia, which is linked to the opening of an air carrier base in Dortmund.
