Forensic psychiatry assessment and human rights in Ukraine: response to Butenko et al's paper ‘Forensic psychiatry misuse in proceedings of administrative offenses’ (2023)Type of submission

The paper by Butenko et al., ‘Forensic psychiatry misuse in proceedings of administrative offenses’ (International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2023) focused on the ‘Case of Zaichenko v. Ukraine (No. 2)’ in the European Court of Human Rights (2015). As the applicant in that case, I wish to respond to the paper by adding further context and detail to the arguments presented. My concerns centre on four areas: findings of national courts, errors and gaps in the European Court of Human Rights judgment, the constitutional consequences of mistranslation, and the broader legal chain of events. Overall, my response to all these circumstances is that intellectuals fear judges as fire, while lawyers fear knowledge and intellectuals. To explain such mutual fear only deepens the horror. This explanation may be correct and precise, but it is also too general. A more concrete half-answer might be this: let us recall (a) the overall number of cases before the Court; (b) the number of judges; (c) the principles of European Court of Human Rights staff recruitment; (d) the frequent incompatibility of member states' normative systems; and (e) their linguistic, confessional, and cultural diversity. Add to this the contradictions of regulation itself, and ordinary human weaknesses. Regulation today has grown to a scale that no single mind can contain, and is produced, not by Solons or Pericles, but by lesser hands. In such conditions, the individual who turns to the Court is often lost behind the informational avalanche. Whom or what can one trust, if not the Court's final judgment? Here I will not appeal to Popper or Lakatos, but only to a much older Athenian, himself once persecuted by a court: ‘Question everything’.