PUBLICITY From the questionnaire of a monitor on the High Specialized Court of Ukraine for Civil and Criminal Cases: “To be admitted into the court building you have to wait for an invitation from a court guard. One can contact him/her only on the internal phone. Generally, the whole process takes around half an hour”. The court hearings have to be announced on the court’s web-site and on the information board in the court building, so that all interested persons could learn about the time and place of hearing they might be interested in. However, sometimes the courts failed to observe these requirements. The courts announced hearings on their web-site in 94% of monitored cases. Sometimes the announcement on the web-site was different from the schedule posted on the information board in the court building. From the questionnaire of a monitor on a first instance court of general jurisdiction: “It was announced on the web-site that the hearing would start at 14:20, but when I arrived to the court at 14:10, I was “late” because on the information board the hearing was scheduled for 14:10 and it started on time so they did not allow me to enter the judges’ chambers”. The monitoring disclosed that the courts rather announce hearings on their web-site than on the information boards. The hearings were posted on the information board in 82% of cases. In some courts, the absence of schedules or incomplete schedules are a common practice. From the questionnaire of a monitor on a first instance commercial court: “The cases have not been posted in this court [on the information board] at all for a long period of time; not all cases are posted on the web-site, some announcements lack certain data, especially when the local selfgovernment authorities are parties to the case”. From time to time the monitors reported that the court hearing schedule contained the surname of the judge and the date and time of the hearing, but did not contain information on where the hearing would take place. Usually, (in 98% of cases) the monitors were able to get inside the room where the hearing was being conducted – the courtroom or the judges’ chambers. However, there were some obstacles to that from time to time, namely, the court staff asked them to show IDs and inform of the purpose of their presence. From the questionnaire of a monitor on an administrative court of appeal: “The secretary did not allow me to enter three [public] court hearings, closing the doors to the courtroom right before me”. In several cases all the interested persons could not fit into the premises where the court hearing was conducted (the judges’ chambers), and they stood in the corridor. Before the beginning of the hearing of a case, which was related to a representative of a national minority, approximately 20 Roma entered the courtroom. Shortly, a court staffer came together with several police officers, and demanded them to leave the room without any explanation. The Roma were forced to leave the room. Report on the findings of the first trial monitoring programme in Ukraine 13