On Wednesday, 16 October, Janis Bordans, the Minister of Justice, signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Denys Maliuska, the Minister of Justice of Ukraine, in order to facilitate cooperation between both countries in the field of justice, human rights, access to court and management of justice. Signing of the Memorandum took place within the framework of the official visit of the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Latvia.
The Minister of Justice J.Bordans emphasizes: “Memorandum of Understanding is an important step for strengthening of cooperation of both countries. That confirms the close commitment of both countries and readiness to cooperate, sharing mutual experience in strengthening and management of the field of justice. Indisputably, both our countries and their management, who wish to have real changes in the country, have to face strong resistance. Corruption, incompetence, covering of failures - all these problems are in favour of elements malevolent for our countries. Considering the complicated situation in the East of Ukraine, Ukraine needs every possible support of us, in order the fair state administration would strengthen and Ukraine would become closer to the European Union and its standards. Therefore I passed to Mr.Maliuska our proposal for further cooperation, including the possibility to share experience on a number of issues related to the area of justice, for example, in the areas of introduction of e-services, coordination of regulatory enactments with the EU standards, trainings of judges and data protection.”
The key purpose of the Memorandum is to promote cooperation between the Ministry of Justice of Latvia and Ukraine. Taking into account the increasing importance of the area of justice in different processes of development of the state, the Memorandum provides to strengthen cooperation of the countries in the area of justice, human rights, access to court and court administration, to facilitate development of common initiatives and projects in the Eastern Partnership Platform on “Strengthening Institutions and Good Governance”, to exchange with good practice, introducing the Association Agreement and EU Acquis communautaire, as well as international conventions in the area of justice, to share opinions and to discuss possible solutions for challenges of the court, as well as to improve exchange of any other information and experience on the topical issues.
At the same time a closer cooperation is planned between the ministries of both countries in the area of the state funded legal aid, legal understanding and access to court, penitentiary system and probation, enforcement of court judgments, criminal expert-examinations, corruption prevention and combating, including ensuring openness of beneficial owners, development of electronic registers and e-trust services, implementation of new technologies as well as alternative settlement of disputes.a