The Cabinet of Ministers ordered the National Agency for Preventing Corruption (NAPC) to resume public access to the online registry of officials’ asset declarations at an emergency meeting on Oct. 29.
On the previous day, the NAPC shut down the registry that detailed what assets — including real estate, cars, cash and more — officials and their family members openly declared. The agency had to do so following a controversial court ruling that had deemed most of its powers unconstitutional.
In response, President Volodymyr Zelensky convened an emergency meeting of the National Defense and Security Council on Oct. 29, which effectively ordered the government to instruct the NAPC to reopen the declarations’ registry despite the court decision.
On Oct. 27, the Constitutional Court practically eliminated Ukraine’s electronic declaration system that obliged officials to openly disclose their assets by depriving the NAPC of most of its powers. The judges also canceled penalties for officials who lie in their asset declarations.
Specifically, the court ruled that public access to officials’ declarations and the NAPC’s authority to monitor and check officials’ declarations and lifestyle were among clauses of the corruption prevention law that violated the сonstitution.
Since 2015, all public officials in Ukraine have had to file very detailed declarations of assets and income. The declarations were publicly available on the NAPC’s website before the evening of Oct. 28.
Now the government is not only asking the NAPC to restore access to the database for the general public but also calling on the agency to resume its work on declaration checks.
The agency finds itself between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it has to obey the court decision. On the other hand, it cannot ignore the ruling of its direct superior.
It decided to go with the ruling and re-open the registry.
“We are subordinate to the Cabinet of Ministers, we cannot but follow their orders,” Valeriia Radchenko, communication adviser to the head of NAPC, told the Kyiv Post.
The agency received the decree of the Cabinet of Ministers and is preparing an order on restoring the registry of the officials’ asset declarations, Radchenko said.
As of 9 p.m. of Oct. 29, an hour-and-a-half after the ruling, the online registry was still unavailable.
How NAPC is going to sort out the legal side of the issue with the Constitutional Court is yet unclear.
Apart from resuming the registry of e-declarations, the National Defense and Security Council, presided over by Zelensky, ordered the drafting of a law that would “restore the integrity of the constitutional judiciary in Ukraine.”
While the wording of the decision is unclear, activists took it to mean that the Constitutional Court will be relaunched.
Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, welcomed the decision and called it a “historic” one.
