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Reformer of the week – Natalie Sedletska
Kyiv’s Pechersk District Court on Aug. 27 gave the Prosecutor General’s Office access to investigative journalist Natalie Sedletska’s cell phone records for the past 17 months, according to the official court register.
Sedletska is the chief editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Schemes investigative television show. The move is part of a case against Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine or NABU. Sytnyk is accused of divulging a state secret by leaking information to journalists.
The secret, which was allegedly leaked by Sytnyk at a meeting with journalists in May 2017, concerns an unlawful enrichment case against a top prosecutor, Kostyantyn Kulik.
“This decision (on access to Sedletska’s conversations) is excessive, blatantly violates international standards and does not comply with Ukraine’s obligations to defend the freedom of speech,” RFE/RL spokeswoman Joanna Levison said, cited in a Sept. 4 statement by RFE/RL.
The Prosecutor General’s Office denied it had any intention of restricting free speech.
Sedletska has published numerous investigative reports about top officials, including Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, President Petro Poroshenko, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and other top officials.
A court has also given the Prosecutor General’s Office access to the phone records of Kristina Berdynskykh, a journalist at the Novoye Vremya magazine, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko’s spokeswoman Larysa Sargan said on Sept. 5.
Anti-reformer of the week – Valentyna Simonenko
President Petro Poroshenko on Aug. 30 appointed Valentyna Simonenko as a justice of the Supreme Court.
Simonenko, who had been head of the Council of Judges and a judge of the previous composition of the Supreme Court before last year, was nominated by the High Qualification Commission in July 2017 and by the High Council of Justice in December 2017. She had been vetoed by the Public Integrity Council, the judiciary’s civil society watchdog, but the veto had been overridden by the High Qualification Commission.
Simonenko registered as a Russian taxpayer in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2015, according to the official register of Russia’s Federal Tax Service checked by the Kyiv Post.
“By appealing to the illegal occupation authorities and assuming legal obligations before the aggressor country, she effectively recognized the jurisdiction of Crimean occupation authorities and agreed to pay taxes to the aggressor country’s budget, at whose expense the war against the Ukrainian people is being waged,” the Public Integrity Council said in February.
A screenshot from the register of Russia’s Federal Tax Service on Valentyna Simonenko.
The Public Integrity Council said that Simonenko had been lying when she claimed in an interview at the High Qualification Commission in May that she had not contacted Russian occupation authorities in Crimea in any way.
According to the Ukrainian law on Russian-occupied territories, any interaction between Ukrainian officials and the occupation authorities is banned.
Simonenko claimed in response to the information that she had been automatically registered by Russian occupation authorities based on her pre-annexation status on Crimea, without being aware of it.
Roman Maselko, a member of the Public Integrity Council, refuted Simonenko’s claim, saying that the site of Russia’s Federal Tax Service shows that she used her post-annexation Ukrainian passport, issued in 2015, to register as a taxpayer in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Her sister serves the Russian occupation authorities in Sevastopol as an official, while her ex-husband had business ties to the occupied territories while they were still married, and she visited the areas after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Public Integrity Council said. Simonenko argued that she disagreed with her sister on politics and that she had nothing to do with her ex-husband’s activities.
Simonenko has also criticized judicial reform, lambasted Serhiy Bondarenko, a whistleblower judge pressured by his boss, failed to punish judges who persecuted EuroMaidan demonstrators, lashed out at electronic asset declarations, and criticized the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Public Integrity Council said. Simonenko argues that she has done everything in her power to help whistleblower judges and punish those involved in political cases. She has failed to declare firms owned by her ex-husband but said he had not informed her of them.
