Several civil society groups on June 6 announced they were withdrawing from the process of police reform because the Interior Ministry under Arsen Avakov is blocking it.
A vetting process launched last year envisions dismissing corrupt, dishonest and unprofessional officers.
But representatives of two volunteer groups helping the military – Narodny Tyl (People’s Home Front) and combat.ua – along with the AutoMaidan car-based protest group — said at a news briefing that they no longer wanted to be held responsible for the vetting process because of obstruction from the Interior Ministry, with 230,000 law enforcement officers. The groups previously delegated their activists to vetting commissions.
“A comeback of the old system has taken place in the vetting commissions,” said Roman Sinitsyn, a member of Narody Tyl. “The way vetting is happening after Odesa and Mykolayiv proves that no reform is taking place.”
Yevhen Holubenko, an AutoMaidan activist, said that “representatives of the Interior Ministry have taken over the process.”
The number of Interior Ministry representatives in vetting commissions increased in May, and the ministry is also appointing members of loyal non-governmental organizations, as opposed to truly independent civil society groups, the activists claimed.
But Ivan Varchenko, an advisor to Avakov and head of one of the police vetting commissions, denied accusations of sabotage.
Varchenko told the Kyiv Post he saw nothing wrong with the bigger number of ministry representatives, and called on the activists to name the non-governmental groups allegedly linked to the ministry.
Before May, an independent recruiting center played the dominant role in the police reform and selected members of non-governmental organizations for vetting commissions, the activists said. The recruiting center includes representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP).
But now the commissions are completely dominated by Avakov, his advisors and the old guard opposed to reform, AutoMaidan activist Kateryna Butko said.
“We believe the new mechanism of vetting has destroyed the main criterion of its success – its independence from the old police system,” she said.
One of Avakov’s advisors in charge of vetting is Mikhailo Apostol, who allegedly received a $1.4 million bribe from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in 2012, according to accounting spreadsheets published by Ukrainska Pravda last week. Apostol has denied getting the bribe. The activists also accused Volodymyr Fylenko, another advisor to Avakov, and Ihor Klymenko, head of the National Police’s human resources department, of blocking the reform.
The police reform is beginning to resemble ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s flawed competition for prosecutors’ jobs, which resulted in the re-instatement of old prosecutorial cadres last year, Holubenko said.
Sinitsyn also said that the percentage of police officers who had been fired during the vetting process had been “very small” from the beginning, and is now even smaller.
He added that in one oblast only one out of 28 top police officers had been dismissed. Sinitsyn said he could not name the oblast until the final vetting results are released.
The activists claimed that the official figures for the number of those fired were contradictory and overestimated.
Sinitsyn said that only “several percent” of police officers had been fired as a result of the vetting process.
No more than 25 percent are fired by lower-level vetting commissions, about half of them are re-instated by appellate commissions, and most of the remaining ones could be re-instated by the courts, said Pavlo Kashchuk, a member of the combat.ua group.
Varchenko denied the accusations, saying the final numbers for the latest round of vetting have not been released yet. He accused the activists of manipulation.
He said that in each oblast up to 15 percent of rank-and-file police officers and from 20 to 80 percent of top police officials had been fired during the previous rounds of vetting, with the figures varying from region to region.
Holubenko said that the vetting process also had technical flaws, including too little time being allocated for interviews with police officers, vetting procedures being carried out in absentia in some cases, and imperfect legislation allowing the courts to re-instate fired officials.
Previously Yevgenia Zakrevska, a member of a police vetting commission and a lawyer for slain EuroMaidan protesters, also accused the Interior Ministry of blocking police reform.
Olga Khudetska, a prominent journalist and member of a vetting commission, said last month she was leaving the commission because imperfect legislation made efforts to reform the police “meaningless.”
Meanwhile, Sasha Drik, head of the Civic Lustration Committee, has accused the ministry of failing to comply with the lustration law, which stipulates the dismissal of top officials who served under Yanukovych. She said the ministry was not taking into account lustration criteria during the vetting process.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
