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On 8 June 2026, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a draft Law “On the Establishment of a Dual System of Regular Penitentiary Inspections” (registration No. 15300).
Formally, this is presented as the fulfilment of a long-standing constitutional obligation: paragraph 9 of Section XV, “Transitional Provisions,” of the Constitution of Ukraine has, since 2016, required the creation of precisely such a system, so that the prosecutor’s office would finally stop performing a function that is not proper to it under Article 131-1 of the Constitution – supervision over compliance with the law in the application of measures related to the restriction of citizens’ personal liberty. For more than twenty years this transitional provision has remained unfulfilled, and now, it seemed, a chance had appeared to finally implement it.
However, having analyzed the text of draft law No. 15300, together with the opinion of the Main Scientific and Expert Directorate of the Apparatus of the Verkhovna Rada, the opinion of the relevant Committee on Human Rights, De-occupation and Reintegration, and the information note of the Verkhovna Rada’s Research Service, one has to state: this chance is again being missed – and missed systemically and conceptually, not through isolated legal-technical shortcomings that could be corrected by amendments before the second reading.
Five years ago, in June 2021, together with Andrii Chernousov, we already wrote in Dzerkalo Tyzhnia about the risks of the earlier version of this idea – the Ministry of Justice’s draft law on penitentiary inspections (“Instead of Prosecutorial Oversight, Another Law-Enforcement Monster?”). Regrettably, that article essentially has to be reprinted today – but now with far more serious reservations. Draft law No. 15300 does not merely reproduce the conceptual flaws of the 2021 text – it magnifies them, multiplies the number of “inspecting” subjects, adds psychiatric institutions, temporary refugee accommodation centres, and military units, and, in the end, creates a construct that, judging by everything, is unclear even to its own drafters.
THE CENTRAL SUBSTITUTION: INSPECTION IS NEITHER RIGHTS SUPERVISION NOR COMPLAINT HANDLING
The very first article of the draft law contains a conceptual error from which everything that follows flows logically, if wrongly. The dual system of regular penitentiary inspections is defined as “a set of subjects determined at the legislative level, authorized to exercise control over the observance of the rights and freedoms of persons held in places of deprivation of liberty.” The main task of the dual system (Article 1, part 2 of the draft) is declared to be the very same thing – control over the observance of rights and freedoms.
But a penitentiary inspection, by its very nature, is not about protecting the rights of a specific individual and not about examining that individual’s complaint. It is about safety within the institution and about assessing the atmosphere prevailing there, the effectiveness of the institution’s management, the rationality of resource use, the transparency of its activities, the publication of statistics and analytics – in other words, about whether the institution as a whole is safe, free of torture, violence and informal prison hierarchies, or is not. An individual complaint is the subject matter of prosecutorial supervision, judicial control, an application to the Ombudsman, or, ultimately, criminal proceedings. It is not the subject matter of inspection.
By equating inspection with the protection of an individual’s rights, the drafters of the bill have, de facto, condemned the new institution to become yet another version of the Soviet general prosecutorial oversight – only now dispersed among eight different agencies.
In Article 7 of the draft, among the main tasks of the subjects of internal inspections, one again and again finds “exercising control over the observance of rights and freedoms,” “prevention of torture,” and “compliance with the regime, procedure and conditions of detention” – that is, the content described is precisely individual human-rights protection, not managerial and evaluative activity.
Point 11 of part 1 of Article 8 goes even further, empowering the subjects of internal inspections “to take measures for the restoration of human rights and compensation for harm caused to the general interests of society and the state” – a formulation whose implementing mechanism is explained nowhere and which, in all likelihood, is a norm destined to remain a dead letter: it is unclear which subject, under what procedure, before which court, and on the basis of which code, the inspection is supposed to “compensate for harm caused to the interests of society and the state.”
INTERNAL INSPECTIONS: A RENAMING OF EXISTING DEPARTMENTAL CONTROL
An analysis of Article 4 of the draft law shows that what is at issue is typical, banal departmental control along the vertical of subordination – the very same control that the relevant bodies already exercise. This, incidentally, is directly acknowledged by the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on Human Rights in its opinion of 15 June 2026 (Minutes No. 149): the functions of internal control are already, in fact, being carried out through the structural units of higher-level bodies, which today already have the authority to inspect the institutions subordinate to them. The Main Scientific and Expert Directorate reaches the same conclusion: the draft does not introduce new, effective mechanisms of control, but merely streamlines and reproduces, under a new name, existing administrative procedures. In other words, instead of creating a genuine inspection system, what already exists is simply being renamed.
At the same time, the form the report must take (Article 5 of the draft) – sending the institution’s administration a report that is mandatory to comply with, containing demands to remedy violations – is an almost verbatim replica of the traditional Soviet general oversight exercised through a prosecutor’s submission (“podannia”). It is also telling that the official website of the authorized subject does not publish the inspection reports themselves (in which the real picture of how the institution functions, how safe, transparent and accountable it is, would actually have to be disclosed), but only the “results” – that is, the extent to which recommendations already issued have been implemented. An instrument that should have become a window of transparency for society is turned into internal bureaucratic reporting on compliance with directives.
EXTERNAL INSPECTIONS: A SUBSTITUTION, NOT A NEW BODY
The situation with external penitentiary inspections is even more telling. Article 20 of the draft names the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights as the sole subject of external inspections, while Article 21 states directly that external inspections are carried out “through the exercise of the functions of the national preventive mechanism.” But the Ombudsman already exercises the national preventive mechanism without this law – pursuant to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture.
Accordingly, as the relevant Committee of the Verkhovna Rada rightly notes, the draft law’s provisions on external inspections, in this part, “lose their legal meaning,” since instead of creating a new instrument of control, what occurs is a simple renaming of an already existing mechanism. The Verkhovna Rada’s Research Service states essentially the same thing, only more cautiously and in more academic language: the main burden of external inspection falls, in effect, exclusively on the Commissioner, which will raise the question of additional funding for that institution – without any new substantive content in the function itself.
WHY THE OFFICIAL BODIES’ FINDINGS ARE TOO DELICATE
Both the opinion of the Main Scientific and Expert Directorate and the opinion of the relevant Committee, as well as the note of the Research Service, contain fair, professionally balanced remarks – ranging from the conflict over the Ombudsman’s status, through the risks of an excessive volume of personal data, to inconsistent terminology. But for all the value of these documents, none of them calls things by their proper names: the penitentiary inspection in this draft law is not a penitentiary inspection. It is a second prosecutor’s office – or, more precisely, several parallel quasi-prosecutor’s offices distributed among agencies, disguised as the international standard of a “dual system,” which in reality is about something else entirely.
Meanwhile, the problem does not lie in individual articles that could be corrected before the second reading. It lies in the very philosophy of the document. The idea of a penitentiary inspection, as embedded in the Nelson Mandela Rules and in the European Prison Rules, concerns a regular, systemic, managerial assessment of the institution as a whole: whether its operation complies with legal requirements and standards, whether resources are used effectively, whether the atmosphere in the institution is safe, and whether informal prison hierarchies dominate it. This is the logic of a “quality certificate” for the institution, not the logic of examining an individual complaint. Draft law No. 15300 consistently, article by article, substitutes this logic with the logic of a punitive, retrospective reaction to violations already committed – that is, precisely what, under the design of the 2016 constitutional reform, inspections were not supposed to be.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF THIS TEXT IS ADOPTED AS IT STANDS
The practical result is not hard to predict. Instead of a single body that carried out penitentiary oversight – the prosecutor’s office – at least eight subjects of internal inspections will appear (the Security Service of Ukraine, the Ministry of Defence and the Military Law-Enforcement Service, the National Guard, the central body for the execution of punishments and probation, the National Police, the State Border Guard Service, the migration service, and the health-care authority), plus the Ombudsman as the subject of external inspections. In each of these bodies it will be necessary to create or designate authorized units, ensure their independence within their own agency (which is already, in itself, a contradiction in terms), train personnel, and allocate a budget. The effect will be a colossal bureaucratic apparatus that absorbs resources, produces reports, demands explanations, and initiates the bringing persons to liability – while in no way bringing society closer to an answer to the simple question of whether a specific penal institution, pre-trial detention centre, psychiatric facility or guardhouse is safe for the person held there, or is not.
Safety, transparency, accessibility of statistics, accessibility of reports, accessibility of assessments of management quality – the very things for the sake of which the dual system of regular inspections was conceived back in 2016 – this draft law does not add. Instead, it risks adding yet another layer to the control-and-supervisory vertical, in the spirit of Gleb Uspensky’s formula “drag it out and don’t let go,” which has nothing in common either with international standards or with the real needs of reform.
WHAT A GENUINE PENITENTIARY INSPECTION INSTITUTION SHOULD LOOK LIKE
Ukraine does not need yet another body for individual human-rights protection, nor another prosecutor’s office under a new name, but a national counterpart to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) in terms of its operating principles – though with a broader focus – an autonomous, specialized body, not organizationally tied to the Ombudsman, focused not solely on the prevention of torture but, above all, on the transparency of places of deprivation of liberty and on the safety of the persons held there.
Such a body should not examine individual complaints – just as the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture itself does not examine them. Its task should be to visit institutions regularly, to analyze managerial effectiveness, to assess the atmosphere and the level of both static and dynamic safety, to publish ratings and assessments of institutions, to make statistics and reports accessible, and, ultimately, to give a clear, public answer to a specific question: is this institution, as of the moment of inspection, safe and free of torture, violence and informal prison hierarchies – or is it not. An inspection report should be not an instrument for bringing officials to liability, but a kind of quality certificate for the institution – public, comparable over time, and understandable to society.
Building such a body requires an approach opposite to the one embedded in draft law No. 15300: not the dispersal of the function among eight agencies, leaving each to control itself, but the creation of a single, autonomous, professional institution; not the language of “supervision” and “control over the observance of rights,” but the language of managerial audit and safety assessment; not the examination of complaints, but systemic monitoring; not a report sent to the administration against a signed acknowledgment of compliance, but a public, published, comparable rating.
It is also fundamentally important that such a body should not be built into the logic of “punishing the guilty official.” The purpose of inspection, as defined by Rule 83 of the Nelson Mandela Rules, is to obtain assurance that the administration of the institution is carried out in accordance with existing laws, regulations, policies and procedures, and that the rights of prisoners are protected; inspectors are empowered to make recommendations to the administration, not to present it with demands under threat of being held liable. The Main Scientific and Expert Directorate rightly draws attention to the fact that draft law No. 15300 consistently moves in the opposite direction: Article 8 of the draft grants the subjects of internal inspections the right to demand explanations from officials regarding violations, to demand the annulment of acts, and to initiate the bringing of those responsible to liability. This is the logic of a punitive body, not of the institution’s “critical friend,” which the penitentiary inspection was, by design, supposed to be. An institution whose staff perceive the inspector not as a professional who helps identify systemic problems, but as yet another auditor looking for a pretext to punish, will rationally conceal problems rather than disclose them. In the long run, this undermines the very possibility of obtaining a reliable picture of what is happening in places of deprivation of liberty – that is, the very thing for the sake of which the system of regular inspections was conceived in the first place.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION
Five years ago, the warning about the risk of the emergence of “another law-enforcement monster instead of prosecutorial oversight” was heeded only in part. Today, when draft law No. 15300 in effect resurrects that very same conceptual error – now in a far more elaborate, resource-intensive and less comprehensible form – one is compelled to repeat the same warning, but with far greater alarm. This is not a draft law that needs cosmetic amendments before the second reading. This is a draft law that proposes a step into the abyss: the creation of a construct that is, apparently, unclear even to its own drafters, one that will absorb resources, build up yet another bureaucratic apparatus – and will not give society the one thing it truly needs: an honest, regular, transparent answer to the question of whether places of deprivation of liberty in Ukraine are safe.
