The Supreme Court has declared the reduction of civil servants’ pensions after recalculation under the new rules illegal. The Pension Fund will no longer be able to use the Cabinet of Ministers’ Resolution No. 823 to reduce already assigned payments.<\/p>\n
The Cassation Administrative Court within the Supreme Court has made a decision that could be a turning point for thousands of Ukrainians receiving civil servant pensions. The judges ruled: The Pension Fund does not have the right to reduce an already assigned pension, referring to the new rules for calculating wages.<\/p>\n
The essence of the dispute is in the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers No. 823, which changed the mechanism for determining earnings for calculating civil servant pensions. After its adoption, territorial departments of the Pension Fund began to massively request new salary certificates and recalculate already assigned payments – most often to a lesser extent.<\/p>\n
The case of a resident of the Zhytomyr region, who on January 30, 2024, applied to the Pension Fund with an application for transferring a civil servant to retirement, was illustrative. Along with the documents, she submitted a certificate of salary, rank and seniority as of January 2024. However, the fund calculated the payment based on the data of December 2023, ignoring the more recent certificate.<\/p>\n
Initially, the courts of first and appellate instances obliged the Pension Fund to recalculate taking into account the January certificate. But after Resolution No. 823 came into force, the fund revised the pension amount again – and the payment was reduced from UAH 11,862.77 to UAH 9,486.90 per month.<\/p>\n
Why the Supreme Court did not agree with the Pension Fund<\/p>\n
The Court of Cassation drew attention: it does not matter what the Pension Fund called its actions – clarification, alignment or recalculation. In fact, the fund re-determined the amount of the already assigned pension, which contradicts the legislation.<\/p>\n
Paragraph 5 of Order No. 622 directly restricts the use of new salary certificates – they are issued exclusively for the purpose of assigning a pension, and not for revising or reducing already established payments. The government, having changed the calculation mechanism for future pensioners, simultaneously excluded the possibility of applying new norms to already assigned pensions.<\/p>\n
An already assigned pension is a property interest protected by Article 1 of the First Protocol to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights.<\/p>\n
The court also emphasized the violation of the principle of irreversibility of the effect of regulatory legal acts in time. After assigning a pension, the state is obliged to guarantee its payment in the established amount, and further changes in the legislation cannot worsen the person’s situation. The judges referred to the practice of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine and the European Court of Human Rights.<\/p>\n
What the court decided<\/p>\n
Following the results of consideration of case No. 240\/25473\/24, the Supreme Court partially satisfied the cassation appeal. The actions of the Main Department of the PFU in the Zhytomyr region regarding the application of Resolution No. 823 during the recalculation were found to be unlawful. The court ordered the fund to conduct a new recalculation and pay the pension from October 1, 2024 without applying Resolution No. 823, taking as a basis the amount calculated after the recalculation from January 30, 2024.<\/p>\n
What does this mean for other pensioners<\/p>\n
The decision of the Supreme Court in case No. 240\/25473\/24 creates an important legal guideline. If the PFU reduced your civil servant pension after Resolution No. 823 came into force, you have grounds to appeal. To do this, you should contact the territorial department of the PFU with a written application for recalculation, referring to this decision of the Supreme Court. In case of refusal, file a lawsuit in the administrative court.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Supreme Court has declared the reduction of civil servants’ pensions after recalculation under the new rules illegal. The Pension Fund will no longer be able to use the Cabinet of Ministers’ Resolution No. 823 to reduce already assigned payments. The Cassation Administrative Court within the Supreme Court has made a decision that could be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11517,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11515\/revisions\/11517"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/corporativ.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}