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President Petro Poroshenko will try to pass a law soon to create a puppet anti-corruption court that will be unable to fight corruption, Yehor Soboliev, parliament’s former anti-corruption committee chairman, said in a statement on March 19.
Poroshenko’s bill on the anti-corruption court was approved by the Verkhovna Rada in the first reading on March 1 and is expected to be passed in the second reading.
“These days are decisive for the future of the anti-corruption court in our country,” Soboliev said. “We have well-founded concerns that soon there will be an attempt to pass presidential bill No. 7440 in the second reading, thus establishing another ‘pocket court’ with a blurry mandate and consisting of loyalist judges… We cannot let the corrupt system deceive us once again and pass the bill in its current form.”
The same had already happened during the derailed reforms of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Supreme Court in 2015 and 2017, respectively, Soboliev added.
He said that three crucial amendments should be made to the bill.
First, foreign donors should have the power to ban any candidate who does not meet integrity standards, and this ban cannot be overridden by the High Qualification Commission, Soboliev said. Under the current bill, such a ban can be overridden.
Second, the anti-corruption court should not consider minor corruption and drug and arms trafficking cases, he added. The current bill would bury the court with such cases and make it unable to function, according to Soboliev.
Third, a precise timeframe should be set for the court’s creation – within three months after it is passed into law the competition for judges should begin, and in 12 months the court should become fully operational, Soboliev said.
“We should not trust any false promises of representatives of the corrupt system or believe in their manipulations,” Soboliev argued. “Only the adoption of the law with the above-mentioned amendments would create an efficient court for punishing and sentencing suspects charged by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Otherwise we would have a fake court with a fake anti-corruption fight.”
However, the Public Integrity Council – the judiciary’s civil society watchdog – believes that foreign donors’ veto powers alone will not make the court independent, Vitaly Tytych, a member of the Public Integrity Council, told the Kyiv Post.
The discredited High Qualification Commission must be deprived of its arbitrary powers to assign scores subjectively during competitions for anti-corruption and other judges, and such scores must be based on objective criteria, according to Tytych.
During the Supreme Court competition, 90 scores were assigned for anonymous legal knowledge tests, 120 scores for anonymous practical tests, and the High Qualification Commission could arbitrarily assign 790 scores 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 scores for anonymous legal knowledge tests and practical tests (for competitions for both the anti-corruption court and all other courts), Tytych said.
He also argued that, instead of an advisory body with veto powers, foreign donors should dominate in a specially created chamber of the High Qualification Commission that will select anti-corruption judges.
After the Verkhovna Rada gave initial approval to creating an anti-corruption court on March 1, Poroshenko’s longstanding resistance to the court surfaced again.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on March 6, Poroshenko refused to ensure that the court is independent and effective. He told the newspaper that he would resist Western donors’ demands that they have a crucial role in the court’s creation, claiming that this violates Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty.
Tytych and Anastasia Krasnosilska of the Anti-Corruption Action Center argued that a crucial role for foreign donors does not contradict Ukraine’s Constitution and sovereignty. They see it as a ploy by Poroshenko to ensure that he controls the anti-corruption court, which would be impossible if foreign donors played a major role.
The Public Integrity Council also believes that the High Qualification Commission and the High Council of Justice cannot be trusted to conduct an objective and fair competition for the anti-corruption court because they rigged the competition for the Supreme Court. The bodies deny the accusations.
