Under the framework of the Council of Europe Project “Consolidating Ukraine’s Justice Sector Reform” a delegation of representatives from the High Council of Justice’s Strategic planning department and the Strategic planning and European integration directorate within the Ministry of Justice visited Strasbourg on 10-11 July 2018 to focus on monitoring and evaluation methodologies in order to track the progress of justice sector reform in their country.
Implementation of the Justice Sector Reform Strategy for 2015-2020 in Ukraine required creating specialized strategic planning departments in the stakeholders-participants of the reform in order to coordinate their work plans with strategy implementation plans, as well as to monitor and evaluate the results. In view of that the Council has sought to engage representatives of the mentioned departments in a visit to the headquarters.
The main topic of the visit was to study the benefits of introduction and implementation of Progress Review Methodology (PRM) in the Justice Sector Reform. As both Ministry of Justice and the High Council of Justice are the key institutions in coordination of the efforts in their respective chapters of the Justice Sector Reform Strategy the visit proved to be an effective advocating effort for adopting the Council of Europe-developed PRM as the backbone for evaluation of the progress of the reform, and the only tool which is in essence impact-based, rather than activities-based.
In the course of the two-day study visit the delegation had a unique opportunity to discuss the theory of monitoring and evaluation methodology and procedures with the Department of Internal Oversight, enjoy insights shared by the Justice Reform Cooperation Unit, HELP Unit and Department of the Execution of the European Court of Human Rights.
It is expected that consolidated efforts of the stakeholders of the justice sector reform, and implementation of the progress review methodology will have positive influence on the reform of the justice sector in Ukraine in order to ensure and uphold human rights and rule of law for all.