Ukraine’s 2017 Procedural Reform: What Changed for Cross-Border Disputes — and What Didn’t

Cross-border disputes | JVS Law

“The judicial reform will give us consistency.” That was Anna Tsirat, live on Espreso TV on 10 October 2017, a week after the Ukrainian parliament passed the new procedural codes.

Claims like that are not tested on the day of the vote. Eight years have passed. In cross-border disputes — where the consequences show up most clearly — the reform delivered unevenly: in one segment the consistency is real, in the segment next to it there is still none.

Espreso TV broadcast, 10 October 2017 (in Ukrainian).

Law of Ukraine No. 2147-VIII of 3 October 2017 rewrote three codes at once — commercial procedure, civil procedure and administrative procedure. It entered into force on 15 December 2017, the same day the new Supreme Court began work.

For a foreign company dealing with a Ukrainian counterparty, three of those provisions still matter today.

Arbitration cases were moved up to the appellate courts. Under Article 23 of the Civil Procedure Code, applications to set aside an award of an international commercial arbitration, and applications for its recognition and enforcement, are heard by appellate courts sitting as courts of first instance. Where the seat of arbitration is outside Ukraine, the case goes to the appellate court whose jurisdiction covers Kyiv. In practice that funnels almost every dispute around a foreign award into a single court — not hundreds of venues that each see such a case once every few years, but a narrow bench that handles them constantly. That is consistency in the literal sense.

Doubt no longer works against arbitration. Article 22(3) of the Commercial Procedure Code requires the court to read any imprecision in an arbitration agreement, and any doubt as to its validity, effectiveness or enforceability, in favour of that agreement. A sloppy clause — “arbitration in Kyiv”, with no institution named — used to be a workable excuse for dragging the dispute into a state court against the parties’ bargain. The burden now sits on the party resisting arbitration.

The state court became arbitration’s assistant, not only its reviewer. Article 149(3) of the Civil Procedure Code lets a party to a case referred to international commercial arbitration ask a Ukrainian court for interim relief. Assets in Ukraine can be frozen while the merits are heard by, say, a tribunal in Stockholm. Without that provision, a won arbitration often ran into an empty account; we have looked at the limits of interim measures in arbitration separately.

The other side of the reform gets far less attention. A foreign court judgment — as opposed to an award — is still enforced the old way: the application for leave to enforce is heard by the court at the debtor’s place of residence or location, or, if the debtor has no address in Ukraine, where the debtor’s property is (Article 464 of the Civil Procedure Code). In most cases that means a local court in the debtor’s own town. No concentration, no narrow bench that sees these cases regularly.

We said this publicly back in June 2018. The conference “Judicial Reform in Ukraine: Achievements and Further Steps” was held in Kyiv on 1 June under the auspices of the Supreme Court, the Judicial Reform Council and the Council of Europe; its four sessions covered the Constitution as the foundation of independent justice, the new Supreme Court, the qualification procedures for selecting judges, and the guarantees of judicial independence. The architects of the reform were on the panel — the President of the Venice Commission, the Head of the Supreme Court, the Chairman of the High Qualification Commission of Judges. Two things stayed off the agenda: the state of the first-instance courts, and what the newly created High Anti-Corruption Court would mean for the rest of the reform. Both have been answered since — not at the conference, but by what came after it.

Eight years on, the problem is intact. On 1 June 2026 the High Council of Justice set the number of judges for local and appellate courts for 2026 at 6,880 positions against a normative requirement of 11,539. Fewer than three in five. And that is the number of positions, not of judges actually hearing cases.

And one court created by the same reform has never opened its doors. The High Court on Intellectual Property was created by Presidential Decree No. 299/2017 of 29 September 2017, seated in Kyiv, and Article 20(2) of the Commercial Procedure Code assigns to it every dispute over a patent, a utility model, an industrial design or a trade mark. It has never sat. Under paragraph 15 of the transitional provisions of that Code, the court begins work on the day after its President publishes a notice in the official gazette Holos Ukrainy — a single checkable act, and it has not happened. The selection of judges, announced in 2017 for the first instance and in 2018 for the Appellate Chamber, was suspended in full when the High Qualification Commission of Judges stopped functioning.

What makes this a choice rather than bad luck is the other high specialised court. Article 31(2) of the Law on the Judiciary and the Status of Judges lists the high specialised courts; two of them came out of the same reform cycle — the IP court and the High Anti-Corruption Court. The anti-corruption court was built to the same design: established by Law No. 2470-VIII of 21 June 2018 on the terms of Law No. 2447-VIII of 7 June 2018, and switched on by a notice in Holos Ukrainy in the same way — paragraph 4 of the final provisions of that law leaves the opening day to a decision of the assembly of the court’s own judges. Paragraph 5 set the precondition: at least 35 judges appointed, at least ten of them to the Appellate Chamber. On 11 April 2019 Presidential Decrees No. 128/2019 and No. 129/2019 appointed 27 and 11 judges; the assembly adopted decision No. 6 on 7 May 2019; the court began hearing cases on 5 September 2019. Fifteen months from statute to a working courtroom. So the obstacle is not the notice in the gazette — it is what has to happen before it. The anti-corruption court got its judges. The IP court never has.

Paragraph 16 of the same provisions leaves those cases exactly where the reform found them — with the courts that had jurisdiction before 2017. For a franchisor or a licensor that is the operative sentence: a trade mark dispute in Ukraine is heard by an ordinary commercial court, and any plan built around the specialised court’s arrival is built around a date nobody can supply.

The practical reading is direct. The closer your enforcement route runs to arbitration and the appellate tier, the more predictable the timeline. The deeper it sinks into a local court, the more it depends on that particular court’s docket — and the less your case is decided by the quality of your position.

What the procedural reform failed to deliver was supplied by treaty — and only after 2017.

• The 2005 Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements has been in force for Ukraine since 1 August 2023. A court chosen by the parties in a Contracting State must be respected by the others, and its judgment recognised. We analysed that convention long before Ukraine acceded to it.
• The 2019 Hague Judgments Convention has applied between Ukraine and the EU Member States since 1 September 2023.

Together they made a choice-of-court clause in a contract with a Ukrainian company as workable an instrument as an arbitration clause — provided the chosen state is a party to the convention.

• Whether your arbitration clause names a specific institution, a seat and a language. The pro-arbitration rule of construction rescues an ambiguous clause, not an empty one.
• Whether the state of the chosen court is a party to the 2005 and 2019 Hague Conventions. If it is not, the judgment will have to be enforced under the general rules of the Civil Procedure Code — that is, through the local court at the debtor’s location.
• Whether Ukraine has a bilateral treaty on legal aid with that state. Sometimes it offers a shorter route than the convention — this has to be checked case by case.

Originally published on 10 October 2017. Rewritten and expanded in August 2026; the law and figures are stated as at that date.

The claim tested here is the author’s own: Anna Tsirat made it on Espreso TV a week after the codes were passed, and eight years of practice are what test it. Cross-border enforcement at the firm is led by Gennadii Tsirat, whose textbook International Civil Procedure covers the same ground from the enforcement end.