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Serhiy Titenkov – reformer of the week
Serhiy Titenkov and other undercover agents of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are currently coming under attack for taking on the nation’s corrupt establishment.
Titenkov and two other NABU agents face charges by the Prosecutor General’s Office that they allegedly provoked Dina Pimakhova, the first deputy head of the State Migration Service, to solicit a bribe. They deny the accusations.
In November the NABU published conversations in which Pimakhova discusses taking a $30,000 bribe with a NABU agent. The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office said in January it was planning to charge Pimakhova with bribery.
The NABU said that the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, and the Prosecutor General’s Office had illegally interfered in the investigation by arresting seven undercover NABU employees involved in the case.
NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk said that in this way the country’s leadership, the prosecutor’s office and the SBU had foiled all NABU undercover operations and were trying to destroy the bureau.
Yevhen Shevchenko, another NABU agent, said in January that the SBU and prosecutors had foiled the operation to cover up for President Petro Poroshenko and his inner circle implicated in the case. Poroshenko denies the accusations.
Roman Yakovlev – anti-reformer of the week
Roman Yakovlev, head of the IDF Reforms Lab, co-authored a bill on the anti-corruption court that effectively gives President Petro Poroshenko control of the court’s judges.
The Verkhovna Rada approved the bill in the first reading on March 1.
The bill was also co-authored by Giorgi Vashadze, founder of the Innovation and Development Foundation, and Anatoly Zayets and Valentyn Serdyuk from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They deny the accusations of sabotage, claiming that the bill guarantees the creation of an independent court.
The bill has been lambasted by anti-corruption groups and Ukraine’s Western partners. However, Poroshenko refused to amend it before the first reading and now appears reluctant to significantly change it even in the second reading.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on March 6, Poroshenko refused to ensure that the court is independent and effective. He told the newspaper that he would resist Western donors’ demands that they have a crucial role in the court’s creation, claiming that this violates Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty.
Anastasia Krasnosilska of the Anti-Corruption Action Center and Vitaly Tytych, a member of the Public Integrity Council, the judiciary’s civil society watchdog, argued that a role for foreign donors does not contradict Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty. They see it as a ploy by Poroshenko to ensure that he controls the anti-corruption court, which would be impossible if foreign donors played a crucial role.
The presidentially controlled High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice cannot be trusted to conduct an objective and fair competition for the anti-corruption court without severe foreign and civil society oversight and without a drastic change in the competition’s methodology, Tytych said.
They cannot be trusted because they violated the law and demonstrated their political bias by rigging the competition for the Supreme Court, he added. They deny the accusations.
The discredited High Qualification Commission must be deprived of its arbitrary powers to assign scores subjectively during competitions for anti-corruption and other judges, and such scores must be based on objective criteria, according to Tytych. During the Supreme Court competition, 90 scores were assigned for anonymous legal knowledge tests, 120 scores for anonymous practical tests, and the High Qualification Commission could arbitrarily assign 790 scores without giving any explicit reasons, he argued.
Both the law on the judiciary and the High Qualification Commission’s internal regulations must be amended and clarified to clearly assign 750 scores for anonymous legal knowledge tests and practical tests (for competitions for both the anti-corruption court and all other courts), Tytych said.
