Access to advocate contacts in URAU has been restored

The Bar Council of Ukraine has opened up public access to data from the Unified Register of Advocates of Ukraine, which was closed at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The decision was made at a meeting on December 12–13.

Pursuant to Article 17 of the Law «On the advocacy and the practice of law», the Bar Council of Ukraine maintains the URAU for the purpose of collecting, storing, recording, and providing reliable information on the number and personal composition of advocates.

The register contains information about the advocate's surname, first name, and patronymic, the number and date of issue of the certificate of the right to practice advocate, the number and date of the decision to issue the certificate of the right to practice advocate (the number and date of the decision to include a foreign advocate in the URAU), the name and location of the organizational form of the advocate's practice, contact numbers, the advocate's workplace address, contact numbers, information about the suspension or termination of the right to practice advocate's activity, and other information.

The personal data of advocates was closed to public access on the basis of the decision of the BCU dated 02.03.2022 No. 22.

The Vice President of the UNBA, BCU Valentin Gvozdiy recalled that this decision was made to prevent threats to the lives of advocates. During the war, they provide protection to a wide range of individuals, including those involved in war crimes proceedings. At the same time, he noted that today the key problems are fraudulent schemes and the difficulty judges and law enforcement officers have in accessing current addresses and contact details. In particular, V. Gvozdiy reported on the activities of individuals who, using fake numbers and fake pages, present themselves as «assistants» to advocates and impose paid services on their behalf. This discredits not only the specific advocate, but also the advocacy as a whole.

The existence of such schemes in the field was confirmed by the acting chairman of the Bar Council of the Mykolaiv region Dmytro Baranenko, when colleagues find false contacts on social media through which citizens are offered to pay money for «redirection» to another advocate. Chairman of the Bar Council of the Ivano-Frankivsk region Svitlana Petrova spoke about lists of local advocates published on Facebook with real and fake numbers. And the chairman of the Bar Council of the Kharkiv region Viktoria Gayvoronska noted that fraudulent databases have existed online since 2019 and are actively used regardless of whether the Unified Register of Advocates is open or not.

The members of the BCU paid special attention to the problem of judges and law enforcement agencies not having access to the current addresses of advocate's workplaces. According to V. Gvozdiy, this complicates the verification of the place of activity during the preparation of searches and creates conditions for abuse. BCU Secretary Igor Kolesnikov cited examples of situations where the closed nature of the data made it possible to carry out procedural actions without proper confirmation that the premises were used by an advocate.

According to D. Baranenko, the openness of official contact details will allow citizens to clearly identify an advocate and avoid mistakenly contacting fraudsters.

Ultimately, the participants in the discussion agreed that the availability of reliable information in the URAU would facilitate both proper communication between advocates and clients and the provision of guarantees for the practice of law. Therefore, the members of the BCU unanimously supported the disclosure of the registry data.