Judge of the Kharkiv District Court Yulia Zorkina has resigned and will receive thousands in payments from the Ukrainian budget for life. This judge is known for helping the authorities to ban peaceful assemblies in 2012-2013, asking Zelensky not to carry out judicial reform, and could have helped Ihor Terekhov become Kharkiv mayor in 2021 by her decision.
This was reported by Slidstvo.Info.
On 11 July 2024, the High Council of Justice dismissed Kharkiv District Court Judge Yulia Zorkina. From now on, Ukraine is obliged to allocate funds from the budget for the lifetime maintenance of this judge. The amount of this monthly maintenance depends on the salary and length of service — the more years, the higher the amount of payments, which can reach hundreds of thousands of hryvnias per month. In 2023, the judge’s salary was almost 125 thousand hryvnias per month.
Judge Yulia Zorkina
Activists do not speak well of Judge Zorkina. She was included in the ‘Maidan judge’ directory, which recorded judges who, among other things, banned rallies, and Zorkina has at least three such decisions.
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For example, in July 2012, the Kharkiv City Council filed a lawsuit with the Kharkiv District Court to ban the NGO ‘We Are the People of Kharkiv’ from holding a protest. The Kharkiv City Council was concerned that such rallies would interfere with the work of the authorities, as they were planned to be held in front of administrative buildings.
Judge Zorkina upheld the claim of the Kharkiv authorities and banned the activists from holding peaceful assemblies. The judge made the same decision for the All-Ukrainian associations ‘Batkivshchyna’ and ‘Svoboda‘.
Despite such bans, activists still held rallies, but Zorkina and other judges gave law enforcement officers «legal grounds» to disperse these gatherings by force.
Interestingly, before the full-scale invasion, Kharkiv officials wanted to ban the patriotic March of Unity assembly. The authorities explained their lawsuit by saying that they feared terrorist attacks, provocations and the spread of the coronavirus. This time, Judge Zorkina did not satisfy the city council’s claim and allowed the patriotic assembly to take place.
Zorkina has also been mentioned in the media for her decisions during the election of a new mayor in Kharkiv. Then the organisation ‘Opora’, which monitors elections, found that Ihor Terekhov had received 248 votes without any grounds. Their people at the polling stations found discrepancies in the vote counts at 30 polling stations. The authorities did not want to recount the votes, so Opora went to court, where Zorkina considered their claim. The judge did not satisfy the activists’ claim.
Judge Zorkina opposed the judicial reform. She is a member of the judicial organisation that appealed to Volodymyr Zelensky to veto the law introducing open competitions for positions in the High Council of Justice. The law provided for the involvement of independent experts with international experience in the integrity checks of candidates.
In 2022 and 2023, Ukraine spent UAH 6.2 billion on retired judges. For comparison, this money could have bought almost 365,000 FPV drones or more than 15,000 vehicles for the military.
Slidstvo.Info analysed the resigned judges and identified dishonest judges among them. The journalists repeatedly wrote about judges who got into road accidents while drunk, banned Maidan, beat colleagues and could not explain the origin of their expensive property.
Of course, not all resigning judges are dishonest, but there is a tendency for dubious servants of Themis to try to escape to an honorable «retirement».
