The realisation of the right of persons sentenced to life imprisonment to have their punishment commuted after Laws No. 2689-IX and No. 2690-IX of 18 October 2022: first results of law enforcement and judicial practice

The aim of the work is to clarify the legal mechanism for realising the right of persons sentenced to life imprisonment to have that punishment commuted to a milder one, introduced by Laws of Ukraine No. 2689-IX and No. 2690-IX of 18 October 2022, and to analyse the first results of its application and the emerging judicial practice. The methodological basis of the study consists of the dialectical, formal-legal, comparative-legal and statistical methods, as well as the method of analysing the case-law of the Supreme Court and lower courts, applied to primary sources - the texts of normative acts and authentic court decisions of 2025–2026. Results. It is established that the reform was prompted by the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Petukhov v. Ukraine (No. 2) of 12 March 2019 and by Decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine No. 6-r(II)/2021 of 16 September 2021; that the material ground for commutation is enshrined in Articles 81 and 82 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (commutation of life imprisonment to a term of fifteen to twenty years after serving at least fifteen years), and the procedure - in Articles 537 and 539 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine; and that, as of mid-2026, a settled practice of considering the relevant applications has developed, in which the Supreme Court plays a unifying role by confirming that commutation decisions are subject to appellate but not cassation review. Conclusions. The reform ensured partial but not final compliance of national law with the standards of Article 3 of the Convention; the remaining problems are the absence of formalised criteria for assessing the convict’s reform, the lack of uniformity of practice, and the uncertain relationship between the judicial mechanism and pardon.