Two years after the EuroMaidan Revolution sparked new initiative to change Ukraine, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development’s director for legal affairs believes that the country could use specialized anti-corruption courts to help in its ongoing fight against graft.403061
“Without taking away the existing court system, you can create specialized anti-corruption courts to deal with a number of issues,” Bonucci told the Kyiv Post on Nov. 25.
He added that the current judiciary is likely too graft-ridden to trust with the task: “The judiciary should be a remedy to corruption, and not the source of corruption.”
Bonucci spoke with the Kyiv Post one week after appearing at an anti-corruption conference held in Kyiv’s Olympic Stadium. At the conference, Bonucci told the audience that Ukraine needed to “fix” the problem of oligarchic control over the country’s political system.
“One of the difficulties is how you can revamp the system which is inherently corrupt…while keeping an apparatus of state that you require,” Bonucci said. He added: “The challenge is to preserve the continuity of the state when the state is part of the problem.”
In a telephone interview from his office in Paris, Bonucci argued that anti-corruption courts could serve as a means of getting around the roadblock of a corrupt judiciary.
“The other possibility is to have alternative systems in place,” Bonucci said, adding “but it’s not an easy task.”
Such “alternative systems” would not be without precedent—dedicated anti-corruption courts wereestablished in Peru to help fight corruption in the South American nation.
But according to the OECD legal director, a proliferation of well-intentioned anti-corruption institutions could also turn out to be “more of a problem than a solution,” especially if they fail to coordinate efforts.
“This has to go beyond the current government,” Bonucci said.
The OECD has played a leading role in standardizing international anti-corruption enforcement—many of its constituent states trace the implementation of their own anti-graft legislation and institutions to theorganization’s 1997 anti-bribery convention, which set legally bindingstandards to forbid the bribery of foreign officials.
Bonucci praised the country’s establishment of an anti-corruption business ombudsman in former European Taxation Commissioner Algirdas Semeta. However, the OECD legal director warned that overreliance onforeign help would not serve the country in the long term.
“In the medium to long term, you cannot rely on foreign expertise, on foreign skills to fight the problem that Ukrainian government is facing,” Bonucci said, adding, “It’s important that the country reform from within.”
“You need to develop your own capabilities to develop your island of integrity,” he went on, calling it a “question of balance.”
But the international help that Ukraine continues to seek in the form of direct investment and foreign expertise also needs to come in other ways as well, Bonucci said. In the government’s ongoing quest to recover stolen assets from previous corrupt regimes, foreign states that house stolen funds,often inadvertently, need to be willing to cooperate with Ukrainian authorities to help recover them.
“It is not only for the Ukrainian government to do that, but also for the countries in which those assets are now located to be as cooperative as possible,” he said. Bonucci added: “There are a lot of Ukrainian people that want to do the right thing, to be given an opportunity to be involved in the reform effort.”
But in spite of these questions, the OECD legal director takes a long view of the situation. Comparing the battle against corruption to a marathon, Bonucci said that it could take Ukraine decades to win the race.
“Ukraine is at the very beginning of the marathon,” Bonucci said. “Let’s not fool ourselves—there’s no way that you can eradicate corruption in one or two years.”
He added: “What is important is to keep going in the right direction.”
