Parliament reinstated the powers of the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) on Dec. 15.
Two months prior, the Constitutional Court stripped NAPC of its powers to check asset declarations of government officials, giving a start to Ukraine’s ongoing constitutional crisis.
On Oct. 27, the Constitutional Court ruled that some provisions of the law on the NAPC were unconstitutional. Specifically, the court ruled that the online asset declaration system which had government officials, including judges, publish their assets online, was illegal.
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The court also ruled that the NAPC doesn’t have the authority to collect and check declarations for possible corruption. At least three of the 15 judges of the Constitutional Court saw their declarations investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau after being flagged by the NAPC as suspicious.
As a result of the court’s decision, more than 100 corruption cases were closed. The cases involved possible corruption by government officials and were investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and heard in the High Anti-Corruption Court.
A year prior, President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the first conviction carried out by the High Anti-Corruption Court as a major achievement. However, after the Constitutional Court’s ruling on asset declarations, the Anti-Corruption Court had to roll back a number of convictions.
Although the parliament returned the NAPC its powers to check declarations, the bill has no retrospective effect, meaning that all the existing investigations of officials suspected of hiding their assets will be void, and the rolled-back convictions will remain canceled.
Over 300 lawmakers from all factions supported two bills regulating the powers of the NAPC on Dec. 15. Now, Zelensky is required to sign the bills for them to take force. There’s no doubt the president will do so, as he supported the reinstatement of the powers of the NAPC.
The first bill reinstated NAPC’s powers to collect and check the declarations of government officials. The second bill regulated the procedure by which the NAPC can collect and check declarations of judges of the Constitutional Court.
However, according to the bill, the High Council of Justice, the judicial governing body, must be informed of all investigations concerning the judges of the Constitutional Court.
Earlier, the Venice Commission, a legal advisory panel of the Council of Europe, rebuked the Constitutional Court of Ukraine.
According to the commission’s opinion, published on Dec. 9, “the Constitutional Court’s reasoning (to kill the online asset declaration system) was flawed in many respects.”
“That decision may produce critical adverse effects for the functioning of anti-corruption bodies, which is extremely worrying,” the opinion reads.
The commission also noted the Constitutional Court’s judges’ conflict of interest.
At least two of the Constitutional Court judges, Iryna Zavhorodnya and Serhiy Holovaty, were under investigation over incorrect declarations. Nevertheless, they didn’t declare their conflict of interest and voted for the ruling that effectively killed the system of asset declarations.
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Two more judges who backed the ruling, Ihor Slidenko and Volodymyr Moisyk, had failed to declare changes in their assets on time, which is a misdemeanor.
Meanwhile, Oleksandr Tupytsky, the chairman of the Constitutional Court, failed to declare land he acquired in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2018, according to an Oct. 28 report by Schemes, an investigative branch of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Ukraine.
