Five years ago, Ukraine announced an ambitious anti-corruption agenda and launched its implementation, despite permanent ups and downs. Four years ago, I had the honor to participate in the selection panel of the director of the new National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. We spent days and nights interviewing candidates who ran to lead it, united by the awareness of how much was at stake for Ukraine’s future. A year afterward, the bureau sent first high profile indictments to the courts.
It took more than two years and pressure from international partners to persuade Ukrainian ruling elite that specialized anti-corruption court must be established and that, for the sake of its independence, foreign experts shall participate in the selections of judges. Their participation was seen as a last resort, a safeguard to guarantee that no tainted candidates make it to the new court and that any political influence on the selection of judges is eliminated. Moreover, the same demand came from within the country: in early 2018, almost 40 percent of Ukrainians would choose to entrust the establishment of an anti-corruption court to Western experts.
The necessity to involve international experts was also drawn from the 2017 Supreme Court lesson. The judicial bodies, entrusted with cleansing judiciary top down by staffing the highest court with the best competitors, failed their task and selected one-fourth of people distrusted by the civil society. Consequently, it did not have any positive implications for public trust in the judiciary, which did not exceed 16 percent as of late 2018.
For any country, trust in the judiciary and in public institutions matters a lot. But for the country like Ukraine at this stage of development, it is even more instrumental – building up new public institutions and waiting for the results yet to come requires time and therefore public confidence that the country moves in the right direction. Recently, Ukrainian people started to be frustrated with no tangible results of the anti-corruption reform: cases are triggered, but nobody is eventually held accountable, officials are detained but released under mockable bails, corruption schemes investigated but the beneficiaries continuing making fortunes. Headline corruption proceedings, once giving hope and causing genuine surprise, today evoke only irony and disappointment.
With the ongoing historic establishment of the anti-corruption court, Ukraine is standing at the crossroads. It is equally close to winning everything or losing it all.
The Public Council of International Experts, which was established in autumn 2018 to veto dubious candidates for the anti-corruption court, is playing a historical role. The council aims to stop ill practices of covering up in Ukraine’s judiciary. It has all powers and uses them to ban candidates who do not meet integrity and professionalism criteria. By doing so, the council also creates best practices for Ukrainian judicial selection procedure for the years to come.
This is critically important. Not only will each dubious finalist cost millions to both Ukrainians and foreign investors, including the European Union and foreign nations that allocated funds to Ukraine, but more importantly, trust is at stake — the trust of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, who joined the Revolution of Dignity to demand decent living and end of impunity. The revolution, also known as the EuroMaidan Revolution, succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych from power and into Russian exile on Feb. 22, 2014. At stake is the right of all Ukrainians to have confidence in an independent, upstanding and efficient judiciary. Last but not least, at stake is also reputation in the face of EU member states and other governments and international donors, who acted as drivers of Ukraine’s anti-corruption reform, and the credibility of European judicial standards.
Anti-corruption reform in 2014-2018 is a polygon, where old and new Ukraine are constantly fighting. New tools of eliminating endemic corruption and kleptocracy are tested out there, right now. If successful, they should be multiplied to other countries with similar problems, which means most of the developing countries in the world. No one involved has the right to fail.
Giovanni Kessler was the head of the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) from 2011 -2017 and a member of National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine selection commission in 2015.
