Reformer of the week – Dmytro Sherembei
Dmytro Sherembei, head of the All-Ukrainian Network of People Who Live with HIV/AIDS, on Oct. 11 became the latest anti-corruption activist to come under pressure from law enforcement agencies.
Police, prosecutors and the Security Service of Ukraine raided the All-Ukrainian Network of People Who Live with HIV/AIDS and the Patients of Ukraine, another healthcare advocacy group. The groups are accused of embezzling foreign grant money and using it to fund Russian-separatist forces.
Sherembei and the Patients of Ukraine see it as a fabricated case used by the authorities to take revenge on them for their anti-graft efforts in health care. They have pushed for government drug purchases to be transferred to international organizations.
The case appears to be the latest attempt by the government to put pressure on civil society, the opposition and independent media.
Attacks on and criminal cases against anti-graft activists have become frequent recently. Activists of the Kharkiv Anti-Corruption Center — Dmytro Bulakh and Yevhen Lisichkin — were heavily beaten on Aug. 30 and Sept. 18, respectively. In August, Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, was charged with assaulting a blogger.
On Oct. 10, the police searched Hromadske television to find video footage of the crossing of the border by ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his ally David Sakvarelidze, a former reformist top prosecutor. Sakvarelidze and four other Saakashvili supporters have been charged in criminal cases related to what the government deems to be an illegal border crossing.
Another reformist official, Sergii Gorbatuk, has also come under attack and may reportedly be fired after accusing the Interior Ministry of sabotaging EuroMaidan investigations. On Oct. 11, the Qualification and Discipline Commission of the Prosecutor General’s Office reprimanded Gorbatuk, head of the in absentia cases unit at the Prosecutor General’s Office, for refusing to transfer the case against Judge Volodymyr Babenko to other investigators.
Lawyer Roman Maselko said that Gorbatuk had been preparing to charge Babenko for pressuring Judge Serhiy Bondarenko but Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Stolyarchuk had ordered the case to be taken away from Gorbatuk’s unit to save him from prosecution for political reasons. Gorbatuk interpreted this as illegal pressure and is seeking to open a case against Stolyarchuk.
Meanwhile, Mykolayiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevich from the Samopomich party was forced out of office on Oct. 5 by an alliance of the Poroshenko Bloc and the Opposition Bloc in the city council.
Anti-reformer of the week – Serhiy Slynko
Serhiy Slynko, who was appointed as a judge of the new Supreme Court by the High Council of Justice on Sept. 29, participated in the political persecution of Yuriy Lutsenko, now prosecutor general, under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
In 2013 Slynko and Vyacheslav Nastavny, as judges of the High Specialized Court for Civil and Criminal Cases, supported a lower court’s 2012 decision to give a 4-year sentence to Lutsenko, an opponent of Yanukovych, on theft and abuse of office charges.
The European Court of Human Rights and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe have ruled that there were legal violations in the Lutsenko case. The European Union’s parliament and five EU ambassadors have declared the Lutsenko case to be political, while in 2014 the Verkhovna Rada passed a law to rehabilitate Lutsenko and others as political prisoners. Nastavny, who also became a Supreme Court judge, and Slynko claim the case is not political.
Slynko’s revenues do not match his expenses, while Nastavny has also banned journalists from filming court hearings, according to the Public Integrity Council, a civil society watchdog.
In September the High Council of Justice appointed 111 new Supreme Court judges, including 25 discredited judges deemed corrupt or dishonest by the Public Integrity Council. Their credentials have yet to be signed by President Petro Poroshenko.
