PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY IN UKRAINE'S MINISTRY OF JUSTICE: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Abstract

Public institutions frequently state that managers and public servants bear personal responsibility, yet such clauses often fail to show how responsibility should be attributed in multistage, collegial, and digitally mediated decision-making. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptual model of personal responsibility for managers and public servants within the system of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and to identify the legal, organisational, human-resource, and digital conditions required for its implementation. The study draws on the Constitution of Ukraine, legislation on civil service, administrative procedure, access to public information, personal data protection, public electronic registers, electronic identification, and performance evaluation, together with scholarship on public accountability, digital government, and algorithmic accountability. The methods include system design, functional modelling, doctrinal legal analysis, risk analysis, and scenario testing. The proposed model is structured as a closed six-link cycle consisting of mandate, decision preparation and adoption, protected digital trace, multi-criteria assessment, proportionate consequence, and organisational learning. Its normative core is the principle of symmetry between lawful authority, available resources and information, controllable risk, and the scope of personal responsibility. For collegial and technology-mediated decisions, the model introduces distributed role attribution while preserving the identifiable contribution of each participant. Practical instruments include a process responsibility passport, a material-decision record, version and approval logs, recorded professional dissent, quality indicators, graduated responses, and mandatory after-action review. Scenario testing demonstrates the model's applicability to drafting normative acts, adopting individual administrative acts, enforcement proceedings, and algorithm-supported decisions. The article argues that digital records should be minimally sufficient, tamperevident, role-accessible, and retention-limited, while transparency must remain compatible with personal data protection and procedural confidentiality. The novelty of the study lies in integrating legal individualisation, managerial accountability, and digital traceability into a single learning-oriented cycle designed to strengthen responsibility without creating a blame culture and to support consistent institutional improvement over time.