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Halya Chyzhyk – reformer of the week
Halya Chyzhyk, a member of the Public Integrity Council, said on March 26 that the council is suspending its work because the High Qualification Commission has blocked its operations and because judicial reform in Ukraine has failed completely.
The High Qualification Commission, which denies accusations of wrongdoing, has introduced new regulations according to which any decision of the Public Integrity Council must be signed by all of its members. The council says that the requirement will block most of its decisions.
The High Qualification Commission also said it would ignore vetoes by the Public Integrity Council of judges who do not meet integrity standards unless there is a ruling against the judge by a court or the National Agency for Preventing Corruption. Regulations set by the High Qualification Commission are illegal because it has no authority to set rules for the Public Integrity Council under the law, the Public Integrity Council said.
During the first stage of the ongoing vetting of all judges (testing), which started in November, only about 0.2 percent of 990 judges failed to pass vetting, compared to 40 percent of judges who failed to pass tests during the Supreme Court competition.
During the second stage of vetting (interviews), which started on March 23, the High Qualification Commission interviewed nine judges in just one-and-a-half hours. Since the commission ignored the Public Integrity Council’s vetoes, claiming there were mistakes in them, and since the council is suspending its work, all of them will pass vetting successfully. Interviews with some of the judges lasted only six minutes.
The High Qualification Commission plans to vet 5,000 judges by the end of this year.
The Public Integrity Council believes this process to be a fake. The tiny amount of time allocated to each judge and the blocking of the Public Integrity Council’s work will make sure that almost all judges pass vetting successfully, and the judiciary remains uncleansed and unreformed, the council argued.
The Public Integrity Council believes that the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice rigged the Supreme Court competition in favor of political loyalists, and will likely rig the the competition for the yet-to-be-created anti-corruption court too. They deny the accusations.
The High Qualification Commission must be deprived of its arbitrary powers to assign scores subjectively during competitions for the yet-to-be-created anti-corruption court and other judges, and such scores must be based on objective criteria, according to Public Integrity Council member Vitaly Tytych.
During the Supreme Court competition testing, 90 points were assigned for anonymous legal knowledge tests and 120 points for anonymous practical tests, and the High Qualification Commission could arbitrarily assign 790 points 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 points for anonymous legal knowledge tests and practical tests (for competitions for both the anti-corruption court and all other courts), Tytych said.
Anti-reformer of the week – Oleksandr Mangul
Oleksandr Mangul was elected on March 28 as head of the discredited National Agency for Preventing Corruption, replacing Natalia Korchak, whose term had expired.
Mangul is a protege of President Petro Poroshenko.
In 2015 Mangul, then a member of the Poroshenko Bloc, was appointed by Poroshenko as head of Zaporizhzhia Oblast’s Melitopol District Administration and held the job until February 2018. He was also head of the Poroshenko Bloc’s faction in the Melitopol regional legislature.
Mangul also worked as a ministry official under Poroshenko, when the latter was the economy minister under Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and President Viktor Yanukovych in 2012.
Meanwhile, Stanislav Patyuk, a protege of the People’s Front party, was appointed as a deputy head of the NAPC. In 2003 to 2014, Patyuk worked as a prosecutor in Donetsk Oblast, the home base of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s clan.
Meanwhile, in March Oleksandr Pysarenko, the NAPC’s acting chief of staff, said in a report that top NAPC official Oleksandr Skopych and five of his subordinates could have committed crimes including abuse of power and negligence. Skopych was not available for comment.
Pysarenko said that Skopych and othe NAPC officials had not reported cases when officials failed to file 348 declarations. He also said that Skopych and other NAPC officials had not reported cases when violations punishible with a fine had been found in asset declarations, including that of Culture Minister Yevhen Nyshchuk.
If true, the accusations confirm statements made in November by NAPC whistleblowers Hanna Solomatina and Oksana Divnich.
They said in November that the agency was involved in large-scale corruption and completely controlled by the Presidential Administration, while the NAPC and the Presidential Administration denied the accusations. Their acusations were fully or partially confirmed to the Kyiv Post by ex-NAPC top officials Rouslan Riaboshapka, Rouslan Radetzky and Ihor Tkachenko.
Almost five months after the whistleblowers exposed alleged large-scale corruption at the NAPC, the investigation into it has seen no progress. Not a single official has been charged, fired or suspended due to the corruption accusations.
Solomatina published what she says is correspondence with Oleksiy Horashchenkov, a Presidential Administration official, in which he is trying to give her orders. The Kyiv Post has also obtained the documents of an audit on which the corruption investigation is based.
In November, the NAPC corruption case was transferred, on the orders of Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky and Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, from the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine, in what critics, including Solomatina, believe to be an effort to destroy the case.
The discredited and allegedly corrupt agency has so far failed to punish a single top official for violations in their asset declarations. Instead, the agency will target anti-corruption activists, who will be required to file asset declarations by April 1 in what they call a vendetta by the authorities.
