Democracy in Action: Zero Corruption Conference
Dates: June 7-8, 2021
Venue: D12 art gallery, 12 Desyatynna St., Kyiv
The conference can be watched on https://zerocc.org/
Ukraine’s civil society will host a non-oligarchic international forum to discuss democracy, corruption and human rights.
The event, Democracy in Action: Zero Corruption, will be held in Kyiv on June 7-8. It will cover a broad range of issues, including democratic transition, sanctions, de-oligarchization, anti-corruption efforts, and countering fake news and propaganda.
The forum was created as an alternative to the Yalta European Strategy, an annual conference founded by oligarch Viktor Pinchuk.
The organizers include the Anti-Corruption Action Center, the Institute of Mass Information, election watchdog Opora, media watchdog Detector Media, Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and others. Speakers will participate both online and offline.
The conference was initially supposed to be held in 2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hanna Hopko, one of the conference’s organizers and former head of the Verkhovna Rada’s foreign affairs committee, told the Kyiv Post.
Hopko said that the conference was intended to be a “high-level international platform not controlled by oligarchs.”
She argued that the platform would help Ukraine become a trendsetter for post-Soviet countries, shape the political agenda and seek solutions for the problem of democratic transition.
Another key theme of the conference is Ukraine’s ability to fend off attacks on its democracy, including the use of fake news and disinformation, Hopko said.
A panel called “Leadership in Times of Restoring A Power of Democracy” will feature many top speakers. These are expected to include President Volodymyr Zelensky, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Moldovan President Maia Sandu, Slovak President Zuzana Caputova, Latvian Prime Minister Arturs Karins, European Commission vice president Vera Jourova, NATO deputy secretary Mircea Geoana, and the International Monetary Fund’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva.
Samantha Power, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will deliver the keynote speech.
Brian Bonner, chief editor of the Kyiv Post and one of the conference’s media partners, will moderate a panel discussing oligarchs and de-oligarchization. The panel will also feature Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center.
A panel called “Lawfare & Judiciary in Transitional Democracies” will be devoted to the state of the judiciary and judicial reform.
“Lawfare,” a portmanteau of law and warfare, refers to the use of the legal system by repressive regimes against their opponents and civil society. The discussion will feature Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council; Gianni Buquicchio, president of the European Commission for Democracy through Law, or Venice Commission; and Halyna Chyzhyk, a judicial expert at the Anti-Corruption Action Center.
Another panel on judicial reform, “Fair Justice in Transitional Democracies: Bold Solutions to Modern Threats,” will include Justice Minister Denys Maliuska and Hanna Suchocka, honorary president of the Venice Commission.
The conference will also address “anti-democracy propaganda narratives in Ukraine” — a reference to fake news spread by the Kremlin, oligarchs and other actors. A panel called “International response to disinformation” will feature Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at John Hopkins University, and Kateryna Kruk, Facebook’s public policy manager for Ukraine.
The speakers at the “Joint response to weaponization of corruption” panel will include Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine; Oleksandr Novikov, head of the National Agency for Preventing Corruption, and Drew Sullivan, publisher of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Kyiv Post partner.
Another anti-corruption panel, called “Strong legislative response to strategic corruption as a hybrid threat to democracy and security globally”, will feature U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Anastasia Radina, head of the Ukrainian parliament’s anti-corruption committee.
A panel called “Democratic resilience through elections” will be devoted to the role of civil society and the international community in elections.
The speakers will include Olha Aivazovska, head of Ukrainian election watchdog Opora, and Alexander Shlik, a representative of Belarusian opposition politician Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who ran against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in the 2020 presidential election. While Tikhanovskaya got more votes, Lukashenko rigged the results, declared victory and actively suppressed protesters — Tikhanovskaya is now in exile.
One of the panels will cover the democratic transition of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova as models for other post-Soviet countries. The speakers will include Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Michael Carpenter, managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
A panel covering NATO integration will feature Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine, and Laura Cooper, deputy assistant secretary of Defense.
Another panel will discuss personal sanctions and other ways to respond to human rights violations and corruption. It will be attended, among others, by Bill Browder, a British financier who has campaigned for justice in the case of Russian tax advisor Sergei Magnitsky, who died while being held in pre-trial detention in Moscow in 2009.
Magnitsky had uncovered a $230 million corruption scheme by Russian high-ranking officials. Investigators imprisoned him on the same charges he leveled against authorities. An independent investigation into Magnitsky’s death found that was killed by abuse and deliberate negligence from prison officials. His death prompted a diplomatic scandal between Russia and the United States, with the U.S. government imposing sanctions against all Russian officials implicated in the case.
A panel called “Local Communities’ Response to Global Hybrid Threats: the Role of Small and Big Cities” is expected to feature Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko and Mykolayiv Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych.
The final panel will be devoted to preventing the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline.
