Trust of Ukrainians in courts grows from 5% to 16% - USAID

Trust in the judiciary among Ukrainians who participated in court hearings is twice as high as among Ukrainians in general, who mostly receive information on judiciary from the news, according to an all-Ukrainian survey of citizens on the independence and accountability of the judiciary and the perception of the judicial reform, as well as a survey of Ukrainian public and justice sector professionals who are participants to court proceedings, but do not work in the judicial system, which was conducted by the USAID New Justice Program in September 2018. 

The poll shows that the trust of the population, which takes the bulk of information on judicial reform and courts from television (90%), has increased by 3.2 times over the past four years. It was 5% in 2015 and was growing for four years, reaching 16% in 2018. According to Eurobarometer, it was 20%.

At the same time, according to the poll, In the course of four years, the trust of the Ukrainians - participants to court proceedings - also has a tendency to increase - from 16% in 2015 to 34% in 2018.

The level of the legal professionals' trust to the judiciary increased from 38% in 2017 to 41% in 2018. Meanwhile, 47% of legal professionals expressed trust in the individual courts, where they represent the interests of parties. 

According to the survey, the key factors for growing trust in the judiciary are the communication of the judiciary with the public, the satisfaction of the participants in court proceedings with the work of the court, and general direct correlation with trust in other branches of government.

The USAID survey covered attorneys, prosecutors, in-house lawyers of government entities and businesses, and Ministry of Interior investigators. The survey was conducted in September 2018 with the help of personal interviews with 400 people in Ukrainian cities with a population of over 50,000 people. The survey polled 2,478 citizens in all regions of Ukraine, except for Crimea, non-government controlled areas and the area of the Joint Forces Operation in Donbas. The survey was conducted from September 12 to October 1, 2018.

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