While most people have long ago concluded that Ukraine's sick criminal justice system needs an overhaul, prosecutors continue defending their work - despite the fact that 15,000 people working in the service have not taken a single big corruption case to court since last year's EuroMaidan Revolution.
Still,
Deputy Prosecutor General Yuriy Sevruk said there’s nothing wrong with his segment
of the criminal justice system.
Sevruk
threatened to sue the Anti-Corruption Action Center, Ukraine’s watchdog
organization. “You will have to prove … that I flunk reforms in court,” Sevruk
threatened Daria Kaleniuk, executive director at the Anti-Corruption Action
Centre.
Sevruk
said the nation will cut the prosecution service to 10,000 people based on
caseload. “Where the quantity of employees does not correspond to the
quantity of criminal proceedings, staff will be reduced up to 30 percent, in
others – up to 5 percent,” he said.
Sevruk blamed media
smears for prosecutors’ inability to attract quality outside candidates. “The
media hysteria that everyone in prosecution is corrupt … led to reduction of
quantity of outside candidates,” he said.
He
expects that new prosecutors will start working in local offices on Dec. 15.
However,
Kálmán Mizsei, head of the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine, said
Ukraine’s criminal justice system needs improvement urgently.
“We
have to be cognizant of the fact that the institutional system that hasn’t
reformed in Ukraine had been responsible of the worst atrocities against
humanity in the history of mankind,” Mizsei said at the Crisis Media Center on
Oct. 13. “This and the Nazi system.”
Ukraine
missed its change to shed its Soviet ways in the early 1990s, as its neighbors
did, Mizsei said. Still, he said, the European Union remains sympathetic: “We know it’s difficult. We try to help. We are
demanding … expecting, but we are also patient.”
Mizsei noted the
positives: adoption of a law to restrain the powers of prosecutors, creation of
a new police patrol service and formation of the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau.
But the entire
process lacks a “strategic systematic approach of priorities,” Mizsei said.
First, the new law
on prosecution needs to be accompanied with constitutional changes to establish
independence of prosecutors from politicians.
Second, systematic
changes in the prosecution can start only with new rules. “Partially, they have
changed. But they have to follow in practice” Mizsei
said.
But also
prosecutors have to be paid decently.
“On 1,500 to
2,500 hryvnias people will not do an honest job. Some will, but some inevitably
will not,” he said, citing the successful police reform as an example to
emulate. “You change the rules, you change the institution, and you give people
decent salaries, and then you can hope for change. This should be the model
elsewhere.”
Progress
is promised on other fronts.
Mykola
Husak, member of the High Council of Justice, which hires, fires and
disciplines judges, said that society will see positive changes by year’s end.
The
council took a year off before resuming its work on June 9 and now consists of
“good professionals with high moral qualities, with whom you can put to
rights,” Husak said.
While
he agreed that some judges need to be dismissed, he said it would be unfair if
all judges are vetted.
“Probably,
20 percent of judges created a bad reputation for the rest of judiciary by
taking bribes and bringing illegal decisions,” Husak said. He also emphasized
the need for lawyers to blow the whistle on corrupt judges.
Artem
Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, said greater competition
is essential. “This is the only recipe acceptable for Ukraine,” Sytnyk
emphasized.
He
said that 70 new detectives succeed in a competitive hiring process; 20 percent of them
are former prosecutors.
Meanwhile,
Kaleniuk believes that nothing has changed in the prosecutor’s service.
“We won’t see new prosecutors in December,” Kaleniuk said.
Mizsei
said civil society and business are dissatisfied. After local elections on Oct.
25, “there has to be a new momentum – a new strong push for reforms both
from the presidency, head of the government and parliament,” he said.
Kyiv Post’s legal affairs
reporter Mariana Antonovych can be reached at [email protected]
