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Ukrainian lawmakers failed to approve laws to abolish e-declarations for anti-graft activists on April 3 despite mounting pressure from Ukraine’s Western partners.
European Union representatives urged Ukrainian officials to lift obligations on civil society activists to file electronic asset declarations, and limit them to public officials as soon as possible. The e-declarations, as they are known, are designed to limit the scope for corruption by allowing the public and anti-corruption watchdogs to match a public figure’s lifestyle against their declared income and assets.
However, only 153 lawmakers out of 316 registered in parliament’s session hall voted to cancel the e-declarations, with the Opposition Bloc, Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party and the Volya Narodu faction announcing earlier in the morning session that they didn’t plan to back the laws.
The lawmakers of the Volya Narodu faction said they could back the law only if it also cancels asset declarations for the heads of village councils. Oleh Lyashko, the leader of the Radical Party, said that abolishing e-declarations for anti-corruption activists was”pointless” and the “President (Petro Poroshenko) and Ukraine, in general, is ruled by foreign embassies,” alluding to the fact that many anti-graft activists and watchdogs apply for grants to foreign governments to cover their expenses.
In 2017, a year after the law about e-declarations came into force, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko introduced the changes to it that obliged anti-corruption activists to submit declarations identical to those that public officials file.
After Verkhovna Rada passed the changes, Poroshenko signed them into law in March 2017. The law was slammed by Ukraine’s Western partners, but for over a year parliament has failed to pass legislation that would postpone the deadline for filing asset declarations for activists.
On March 29, the G7 group of countries urged the Ukrainian authorities to cancel electronic declarations for anti-corruption activists and amnesty those who failed to file declarations by the April 1 deadline.
In order to prevent prosecution, Ukrainian activists – including the chief executive officer at Transparency International Ukraine Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, and Vitaliy Shabunin and Daria Kaleniuk from the Anti-Corruption Action Center – filed their online declarations.
“We have fulfilled the law, no matter how absurd it was,” Shabunin says in the video published on March 30.
