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On 30 April 2026, the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in Sklyarenko v. Ukraine. The Fifth Section unanimously found a violation of the procedural limb of Article 3 of the Convention — in connection with the ineffective investigation of an assault on an officer of Kyiv Pre-Trial Detention Centre No. 13. Justice has been restored, but only partially. Nine years after the events. And only thanks to the European Court of Human Rights.
Yet this case is not merely another procedural judgment against Ukraine in the endless queue of similar cases. It is a verdict against the system. A verdict against what Ukraine likes to call “reforms” — but which in reality served as an instrument for pursuing private political and, possibly, corrupt interests at the expense of destroying functional state institutions.
WHAT HAPPENED
On 1 January 2017, officer Anatoliy Sklyarenko, while on duty at Kyiv SIZO No. 13, was assaulted by a detainee who had just turned 18. The detainee climbed out of his cell through the food hatch, approached the officer, and struck him on the head. Anatoliy Sklyarenko sustained a closed traumatic brain injury; in March 2017 he underwent skull surgery. The attacker was identified and questioned immediately — he effectively did not deny what he had done. Eyewitnesses confirmed the assault. A forensic examination established the origin of blood traces on the floor, a metal object, and the attacker’s clothing.
The criminal proceedings have been ongoing for more than eight years. No charges have ever been brought. The Court found that after September 2018, investigative authorities took no meaningful procedural step. Witnesses already questioned were re-interviewed; persons whose whereabouts no one seriously intended to establish were “sought”. The Court placed responsibility for this prolongation primarily on the State.
THE REFORM THAT CREATED DARKNESS
What happened to Anatoliy Sklyarenko’s case cannot be understood in isolation from its legislative context.
On 5 January 2017 — literally a few days after the assault — a law entered into force under which the police lost their powers to investigate crimes committed on the territory of penitentiary institutions. Those powers were transferred to a newly established institution of so-called “penitentiary investigators”.
This law was not born of public need. It was the product of active and even aggressive political lobbying by one of the parties whose representatives at the time held key positions in the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and directly implemented penitentiary policy. The law was adopted almost instantaneously — as part of the demands of this political force for “unblocking” criminal justice reform. No one asked whether conditions existed for the new institution to function. No concept, resource justification, or staffing plan was prepared. Certain leaders simply wanted their own compliant, almost private police force.
Characteristically, after its adoption the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine (apart from a small post on its official website) never published a clear legal position or implementation strategy for this law. Instead, with manic zeal, it set about drafting instructions for the organisation of investigators’ work — instructions devoid of logic, detached from real life, and totally contradicting the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine. When leading scholars and experts, not to mention the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights and international organisations, pointed out that the law was incompatible with everything one could imagine — the Ministry’s enthusiasm evaporated instantly. For the Ministry of Justice, the investigative apparatus became a suitcase without a handle: too heavy to carry, too inconvenient to abandon.
The result was catastrophic. No material or organisational conditions for the penitentiary investigators institution were created — and could not have been created amid post-revolutionary institutional crisis and chronic underfunding. In practice, this meant one thing: for approximately a year and a half, all crimes committed on the territory of the penitentiary system either went unregistered or were fictitiously investigated — by a body that had neither authority, nor resources, nor any real will to act. The State plunged into absolute darkness. Society along with it.
The situation was indeed absurd to the extreme: the body that lacked powers to investigate crimes in the penitentiary system was doing so (police investigators), while the body that formally acquired such powers in practice conducted no such investigations (the Ministry of Justice investigative unit). From 2017 onwards, Ukraine effectively introduced a de facto amnesty for all who had committed or would commit crimes in penitentiary institutions — regardless of which side of the bars they happened to be on.
On 24 April 2018, the Constitutional Court declared this law unconstitutional and struck the provision on penitentiary investigators from the Criminal Procedure Code. But the consequences remained. The atmosphere of impunity generated by this legal vacuum made itself felt for years after the provision’s formal annulment. The Sklyarenko case is one of the most eloquent examples of this.
From the outset, it would have been naïve to expect the penitentiary investigators institution not to be abolished. Its creation is perhaps one of those rare instances in Ukrainian legal history where at least 99% of lawyers knew in advance how it would end. Such unanimous opposition to the Ministry of Justice before the Constitutional Court had probably never been seen in all of independent Ukraine’s history. This in itself is telling — not so much of the legal impeccability of the arguments, as of the obvious fact that the newly created institution was conceived and operated as a “pocket” mechanism for serving private interests, rather than an instrument of effective justice.
It was precisely into this vacuum that the Sklyarenko case fell. The police had been conducting the proceedings until the law entered into force; then, de facto, it passed to the powerless new institution; then both proceedings existed in parallel for a time; after the Constitutional Court ruling, they were reunited and returned to the police. Each transfer meant a loss of time, a loss of momentum, a rupture in the chain of evidence. Each transfer meant another year or more without any meaningful investigative action.
SECONDARY VICTIMISATION
This case illuminates a systemic problem that is rarely spoken about openly: penitentiary officers are extremely vulnerable to criminal attack by detainees, particularly those who are part of organised criminal structures or who operate according to the logic of the informal prison hierarchy. The assault on Anatoliy Sklyarenko, as appears from the case materials, was carried out precisely for the purpose of ritually elevating the attacker’s informal status within that hierarchy — a phenomenon characteristic of the prison subcultures of the post-Soviet space and well-documented in criminological literature.
But the State not only failed to protect its officer — it resorted to secondary victimisation. When it became apparent that an effective investigation threatened to open more uncomfortable questions — about the state of the system, about the level of control in the facility, about the real dysfunction of the apparatus — the corresponding logic operated according to the traditional pattern. The victim was gradually turned into a scapegoat. Although the specific bodily injuries indicated a blow with an object, the materials contain a version that the officer “fell from a standing height,” supported by a reference to the applicant’s alcohol intoxication. This is not merely procedural manipulation. It is a message to personnel: your protection is conditional. You are protected by the system only for as long as your protection is convenient to the system.
WHAT THE ECtHR DECIDED — AND WHAT REMAINED OUTSIDE THE JUDGMENT
The Court found a violation of the procedural limb of Article 3 of the Convention. It established that after September 2018, the investigative authorities took no meaningful steps aimed at establishing the facts of the case and holding those responsible to account. Responsibility for the duration of the proceedings was placed primarily on the State — notwithstanding individual instances of the applicant’s failure to appear on investigators’ summons.
At the same time, the complaint under the substantive limb of Article 3 — concerning the State’s responsibility for working conditions and the level of protection afforded to personnel — was declared inadmissible. The Court noted that the applicant had not provided sufficient evidence to draw a conclusion on the State’s systemic responsibility for the assault itself. The substantive limb remained outside the scope of the judgment. This is important to record: the Court decided what it could decide within the confines of the application as submitted. The systemic diagnosis is a matter for the State, not for the Court.
WHAT IS THE LESSON?
First: reform of the penitentiary system is impossible without serious institutional analysis, without staffing and resource planning, without a transparent concept. Any “reform” that reduces itself to the redistribution of powers between agencies without ensuring functional conditions for the new holder of those powers is not a reform but a sabotage — whether conscious or unconscious.
Second: impunity in prisons is not only a problem for detainees. It is a problem for personnel, a problem for society, a problem for the State — and, as this case has shown, a problem that ultimately reaches Strasbourg.
Third: penitentiary officers must not be made to serve an informal system whenever that system demands that they turn a blind eye to a crime committed against their own colleague.
Justice in the Sklyarenko case has been partially restored — after nine years, by the judgment of an international court. The State of Ukraine has received yet another judgment against it. But what matters more is this: the State and society have received yet another occasion to ask who bears responsibility for reforms that turn specific human beings into victims of their own system. The answer to that question is not in Strasbourg.
