Dispute resolution | JVS Law
Most Ukrainian claims for the protection of honour, dignity and business reputation are lost on proof rather than on the merits. The text is offensive, the harm is obvious — and the court still refuses, because the claimant did not prove what had to be proved, or asked for something the law does not allow them to ask for.
Contents
Four things decide these cases. Each is set out in a provision currently in force.
What the law protects
For an individual there are two separate rights: Article 297 of the Civil Code — respect for dignity and honour — and Article 299, inviolability of business reputation. For a company the basis is different: Article 94 gives a legal entity the right to inviolability of its business reputation, protected in the same manner as the personal non-property rights of an individual.
The remedy itself is a retraction of untrue information under Article 277. It is made by whoever disseminated the information. One rule is regularly missed: where the information was given by an official in the performance of their duties, the disseminator is the legal entity that employs them — the institution becomes the defendant, not the person. Where the disseminator is unknown, the matter proceeds not as a claim but as an application to establish the fact that the information is untrue.
The presumption of falsity is gone
This is the change people still miss. Article 277(3) once provided that negative information about a person was presumed untrue until the disseminator proved otherwise. It was repealed by Law No. 1170-VII of 27 March 2014.
The consequence is direct: the claimant now proves falsity. It is not for the defendant to prove the statement was true; it is for the subject of the statement to prove it was not. In practice this is where most claims fall apart, because they are built on the statement being offensive rather than on it being false.
Statement of fact or value judgment
The second line on which claims are lost. Article 30 of the Law on Information: nobody may be held liable for expressing value judgments, and value judgments are not subject to retraction or to proof of their truth.
Value judgments are statements containing no factual data: criticism, assessment of conduct, and anything that cannot be read as factual given the use of hyperbole, allegory or satire. The statute carves out defamation in the criminal sense.
So before filing, every disputed sentence has to be separated: is this a verifiable assertion of fact, or an assessment? Only the first can be retracted. For the second the law offers something else — a right of reply and one’s own account in the same medium.
One qualification favours the claimant: where an opinion is expressed in a crude, humiliating or indecent form, the speaker may be ordered to compensate moral damage. There the subject is the form, not the content.
A public authority cannot recover moral damage
A provision that changes the arithmetic for state bodies and officials acting in their official capacity. Article 31 of the Law on Information: public authorities bringing claims for the protection of honour, dignity and business reputation may seek only a retraction of untrue information about themselves and have no right to claim moral damage.
That does not stop an official from protecting their honour as a private individual — but then it is a different claim, proved in the ordinary way.
One year, not three
Article 258(2)(2) of the Civil Code sets a special limitation period of one year for claims to retract untrue information placed in the media. Time runs from the day the material was placed in the medium — or from the day the person learned, or could have learned, of it.
The practical effect: the general three-year period does not apply, and a client who arrives eighteen months after publication is most likely out of time, unless later knowledge can be shown.
Where this comes from
The evidentiary side of these cases is the subject of a separate paper by Kateryna Tsirat, comparing the case law of the European Court of Human Rights with Ukrainian practice for both individual and corporate claimants: read the PDF (in Ukrainian).
The litigation side is ours as well. Partners Dmytro Salatiuk and Gennadii Tsirat represented Mikheil Saakashvili, then the former head of the Odesa Regional State Administration, in nine cases on the protection of honour, dignity and business reputation. One of them was a claim by Arsen Avakov against Saakashvili, the broadcasters Mist TV and New Communications, and the journalist Tetiana Danylenko, with the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a third party; the hearing at the Dniprovskyi District Court of Kyiv on 18 September 2017 was adjourned because one of the defendants did not appear. Dmytro Salatiuk’s comment on the case is in this NewsOne report (in Ukrainian).
Nine parallel cases around a single public figure is an unusual scale for this category, and it is the closest thing to a view of what the work actually involves.
Untrue information published about you or your company?
We start not with how offensive the text is but with what can actually be retracted: which sentences assert facts, which are assessments, who the defendant is, and whether the year has run. We tell you plainly whether there is a case and what it can realistically produce. Describe the situation and we will respond within one business day.
Kateryna Tsirat: profile and contact form →
Practice: Dispute Resolution in Ukraine
The law is stated as at August 2026, citing the Civil Code of Ukraine and the Law of Ukraine on Information in their versions in force.