Study says OSCE training helps to increase use of international human rights protection instruments by judges in Ukraine

Ukrainian judges who were trained by the OSCE Project Co-ordinator to apply the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court in their decisions, increased their use of these instruments in their work by more than one third. Moreover, eight out of ten justices who never referred to the Convention in their practice started doing so after the training. Between 2014 and 2017, more than 6000 judges participated in training workshops organized by the OSCE in partnership with the National School of Judges.

The findings were presented in a report of the Institute of Applied Humanitarian Research and based on the analysis of court decisions in the online Register of Court Decisions (a copy of report in Ukrainian is available for download here - https://www.osce.org/project-coordinator-in-ukraine/390503). The analysis is part of the training evaluation exercise that covered 3,604 court decisions made by 680 judges and is based on a specially designed methodology (link (https://www.osce.org/project-coordinator-in-ukraine/321746?download=true).

The report also revealed legislative gaps, identified further training needs and resulted in recommendations for further efforts, needed to safeguard human rights in Ukraine.

The training workshops aimed at developing a sustainable system of judicial human rights education, which   now consists of four distance courses and more than ten trainer-led courses. The training workshops and the report were carried out in the framework of the “Safeguarding Human Rights through Courts” project, implemented v in partnership with the National School of Judges and Supreme Court and with financial support from Global Affairs Canada.