Courtroom journalism is often still associated with boring hearings, bureaucratic language and stacks of paper. However, in the realities of modern Ukraine this field has turned into one of the hottest and most important sectors of investigations. Especially when it comes to war crimes, treason and financial schemes in de-occupied or frontline territories.
Court reporting and systematic analysis of court decisions have become a key tool for ensuring the transparency of justice, protecting citizens’ rights and monitoring the use of public funds. The regional representative of the Institute of Mass Information and his co-author spoke with Kherson journalist Oleg Baturin about experience working with courts and supplemented his account with the authors’ own experience.
Why is it important to attend court hearings?
The modern information space is oversaturated with messages from police, the SBU or prosecutor press services, which report daily on detentions, announcements of suspicion or the referral of cases to court.
“For a news feed this may be enough, but for quality analysis or investigation — absolutely not”, – is convinced Oleg Baturin, a journalist at the Center for Journalistic Investigations.
Official releases usually suffer from formulaic language, hiding the names of the persons involved, company names and the exact circumstances of events. In addition, reports from law enforcement bodies always present a flawless victory, which does not always withstand scrutiny in an actual court process.
A journalist cannot take information from one side at face value, since official versions of the prosecution sometimes rely on inaccurate facts.
“For example, in occupation Telegram channels and eyewitness testimonies it may be recorded that a hypothetical collaborator headed the administration as early as 2022. However, the court’s verdict may only refer to 2024. For the court this may be sufficient, but for a media professional accuracy is a matter of professional integrity. A professional journalist must be in context, critically assess information and be able to independently find details that lie literally under their feet”, – says Baturin.
In the modern world of fast news, not every newsroom can afford to send a journalist to court hearings that last for hours. But this must be done.
Thus, in 2024 MOST published a longread about in absentia criminal proceedings (in absentia). They explained this complex procedure and all its nuances with the help of the judges themselves. And since it was not possible to arrange an interview with the court press service, the publication’s correspondent simply sat in on the hearings and, during breaks, spoke with the judges. This allowed the large piece, full of complex terms and lengthy explanations, to gain a sense of reportage and presence. Without visiting the court and its smoking area, where prosecutors said more during one cigarette break than all their press services did in three years of war, this material would hardly have interested anyone. Instead, it has already been read by over 25 thousand people.
Journalist Oleg Baturin also believes that presence in the courtroom is a top-level skill, although this area is very cumbersome and requires significant effort from newsrooms. You need to systematically monitor the schedule of hearings and understand at what stage the case is.
Even during martial law, open court hearings remain accessible to the public and the press. Regional courts often demonstrate amazing openness and a willingness to communicate with the media.
At the same time he adds that the prosecution is not always willing to make contact. Sometimes, due to such secrecy, prosecutors find themselves in an awkward position when they try to support a weak prosecution while refusing to explain their position to the press. The presence of a journalist in such cases becomes a safeguard against arbitrariness. So newsrooms, especially in relatively safe regions, should consider this kind of work.
“No court decision published online can convey the live context of the hearing. Court documents do not capture the interesting details that emerge during debates or the announcement of the prosecution’s materials. It is then that the living parties to the process appear before the journalist, creating an opportunity to speak with lawyers or prosecutors and obtain exclusive content”, – says Oleg, leaving the building of the Velykooleksandrivskyi court in the north of the Kherson region.
My colleagues and I, waiting for him under the building, joke that he is the first journalist to attend another important hearing in this court, where cases of Kherson collaborators are heard.
How the register of court decisions becomes the main source of exclusives
If courtroom work gives the material emotional weight, then the Unified State Register of Court Decisions (ЄДРСР) is its reinforced-concrete skeleton.
Court verdicts contain colossal arrays of information: witness testimonies, names of seized documents, networks of connections and financial flows. From one such decision you can create not just a short news item, but a full-fledged analytical text.
The analytical power of court registers is especially evident in the field of public finance control and reconstruction. In the texts of rulings and decisions you can find exclusive details that will never appear on the official resources of law enforcement agencies or city administrations. For example, it is court documents that make it possible to reveal the real margin on state procurements. Or the percentage of kickbacks on contracts. MOST was even lucky to compare this percentage in the Kherson city and regional military administrations. The detention of intermediaries happened almost simultaneously and only court decisions shed light on the level of officials’ “black earnings”.
By the way, rulings in one of these cases made it possible to confirm journalists’ hypothesis about the connectedness of a number of companies. Thus one line in a ruling became a sensational discovery for journalists, which they might otherwise never have learned about.
Thanks to the register of court decisions you can track the fate of persons involved in corruption cases dynamically: how after arrests their luxury cars are seized, how companies hastily are re-registered to taxi drivers or how the court alternately imposes and lifts encumbrances on the defendant’s land plots.
There are also absolutely surreal but entirely real stories — for example, when the case materials reveal that a supplier of anti-drone nets for defense needs turned out to be a person with a colorful past in the webcam sphere.
Such materials generate huge resonance and allow even small regional newsrooms to get into the feeds of national media, becoming better known and more influential.
To effectively turn these dry documents into quality investigations and avoid professional mistakes, a journalist must possess several basic skills.
In the editorial office of the online media MOST we teach new colleagues that first of all it is necessary to clearly understand the difference between a court ruling, a decision and a verdict. A media professional must unerringly distinguish the accused from the convicted person whose verdict has already come into legal force, and understand the roles of the parties in criminal proceedings. Without this basic understanding, regrettable mistakes arise that undermine trust in the material.
The second important component is the skill of translating legal language into human language. Court decisions are overloaded with specific jargon and bureaucraticisms. The main task of the journalist is to simplify these formulations, to explain complex legal matters in simple, accessible and lively language without losing the essence of the case.
Moreover, the court register does not work in a vacuum. Information obtained in rulings must be instantly verified through analytical systems such as YouControl, real estate registers and public funds portals. Only at the intersection of these databases does true exclusivity emerge.
Courtroom journalism is not just a chronicle of crime or corruption. It is a critically important tool to hold power to account.
Monitoring court decisions and attending proceedings force judges and prosecutors to work more responsibly, to analyze the evidentiary base more deeply and to approach the formulation of verdicts more carefully.
When the system sees that behind every decision, every bail or lifted asset seizure there are the eyes of a journalist watching, the space for behind-the-scenes deals narrows. That is why the ability to work with court registers today is an essential element of the professional toolkit of a Ukrainian media professional.
Serhiy Nikitenko, regional representative Institute of Mass Information in the Kherson region
Margarita Dotsenko, journalist of the online media MOST