Ex-military judge is now a judge-picker in Ukraine

From this report in the Kyiv Post:

Anti-reformer of the week – Ihor Benedysyuk

Ihor Benedysyuk, the chairman of the High Council of Justice, along with his de facto boss President Petro Poroshenko and High Qualification Commission Chairman Serhiy Koziakov, is one of the three officials responsible for the failure of judicial reform. 

The High Council of Justice on Sept. 29 appointed 111 new Supreme Court judges, including 25 discredited judges that had been vetoed by the Public Integrity Council, a civil society watchdog, because they are deemed to be corrupt or dishonest. The council said it had grounds to believe that the Supreme Court competition had been rigged in favor of government loyalists. 

Benedysyuk was appointed by Poroshenko and has even been awarded a gun by the president.

He used to work for the military court system, subservient to the military leadership. Benedesyuk and the High Council of Justice deny accusations of wrongdoing.

According to his official biography, in 1994 Benedysyuk was simultaneously a judge of a Russian court martial and a Ukrainian one. Public Integrity Council members say that Russian citizenship was a necessary precondition of being a Russian judge, and that his appointment as a judge of Ukraine was illegal if he had Russian citizenship or was not a Ukrainian citizen.

If Benedysyuk is a Russian citizen now, he does not have a right to hold his job. The High Council of Justice denies that he is currently a Russian citizen but has refused to say when he terminated his Russian citizenship and got a Ukrainian one, or provide any documentary evidence.

Bohdan Lvov, a new judge of the Supreme Court and chairman of the High Commercial Court, used to work with Benedysyuk at the High Commercial Court and at military courts. Benedesyuk has requested to be exempted from voting for Lvov due to a conflict of interest. Lvov has been investigated in several graft cases.

(Emphasis added.)