COMMERCIAL COURTS In 100% of cases the judges of commercial courts gave the participants the possibility to get familiarized with the evidence and other documents in the case provided they filed respective motions. The commercial rules of procedure at the time of monitoring did not provide for a court debate, thus, the indicator regarding equality of arms in court debates was not measured. In 98% of cases the court did not exercise moral pressure on the trial participants in the course of the hearing and in 95% did not treat one of the parties better than the other. Moreover, the latter rate documented for the commercial courts is lower than that of the general jurisdiction courts (98%) and the administrative courts (99%). IMPARTIALITY OF THE COURT AND OBSERVANCE OF THE EQUALITY OF ARMS PRINCIPLE IN COMMERCIAL COURTS 4,4 -5 0 5 CULTURE OF CONDUCTING THE TRIAL The monitors evaluated the general status of observance of ethical norms and communication culture both by the court and the trial participants as impeccable in 79% of cases. In 94% of the cases, the court was neither rude, tactless nor haughty to the trial participants, and demonstrated impeccable conduct. In some cases the monitors noted the violation of ethical norms and communication culture by the judge. From the questionnaires of monitors about commercial courts (of different levels and regions): “During the trial the judge … several times lost composure because of the liquidator’s incompetence, she started raising her voice, became nervous, burst into laughter”. “The judge interrupted the parties, did not allow them to finish their thoughts, got distracted talking to the secretary, reviewed some documents”. “From the very moment when the defendant’s representative got up to state his opinion, the judges started interrupting him, allegedly for clarifications, but in fact at the beginning they did not allow him to speak at all... And in general, the way they spoke – yelling and with contempt – did not correspond to ethical norms”. “The judge allowed himself to make inappropriate comments during the hearing […]. In answer to the remark of the plaintiff’s counsel that the previous hearing was postponed because the court needed to send an information request, the judge answered, “This is not my job, you should have reminded the girls and initiated it, I am supposed to listen to you, not to make information requests. I will write a ruling about the canmobileation of arrest. I am not going to pry evidence from you. Go to an appeal court, and then tell it to those academicians, here we do not have time to deal with this”“. Report on the findings of the first trial monitoring programme in Ukraine 29