Name: Olesia Kholopik
Age: 29
Education: Academy of Advocacy of Ukraine
Profession: Deputy Director of the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM)
Did you know? Kholopik left corporate law to work on advocacy campaigns in the voluntary sector.
When she graduated from law school, all doors were open for Olesia Kholopik.
A star student, she headed the Students League of the Ukrainian Bar Association and through it became acquainted with the legal market of Kyiv. She picked a well-paying legal job at Samsung Ukraine.
But just two years later, in 2015, she left corporate law to follow her dream: bringing about social change. She joined the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law, a Kyiv-based think tank better known as CEDEM. Kholopik started as a coordinator of a regional program, on a fixed short-term contract. Three years later, she is the deputy director of the center, managing a team of more than 40 people.
Her main focus over the past two years has been an advocacy campaign for road safety. She has been trying to fix one specific problem: to make Ukrainians buckle up. It is crucial: Of the more than 3,000 people killed in road accidents every year in Ukraine, some 800 people would have survived if they had been wearing seat belts, CEDEM estimates.
Two years into the battle, Kholopik is close to victory: A bill that increases fines for not using a seat belt from Hr 51 to Hr 850 passed its first reading in parliament in September, and will come up for a final vote in the coming weeks. Kholopik and her team drafted the bill.
Only 23 percent of Ukrainian drivers use seat belts, according to a CEDEM study published in November. But even that is a big improvement compared to the previous year, when only 15 percent of drivers buckled up. Kholopik attributes the growth to the highly-publicized bill that increases the penalty. Another factor, she says, is media coverage of gruesome road accidents.
Her second focus is on the Ukrainian court system. The notoriously corrupt courts have been undergoing a reform that requires, among other things, that all judges are recruited anew, in a transparent competition. Kholopik, via the “Chesno. Filter the Judiciary!” initiative of civil society watchdog Chesno, monitors the selection process and researches the candidates. The process has not always been effective, she admits, and some shady judges have managed to get through the selection process.
“Still, it helped bring in a lot of new people from outside the system,” Kholopik says. “There are some successes.”
She is also working on creating a public database of all Ukrainian judges. And after that? She says she’ll find some other battle to fight.
“Here I can see how even small actions are changing people’s behavior. This way, I can be a real participant in change.”
