U. S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland on April 27 in Kyiv: “It’s time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long, and it’s time to irradiate the cancer of corruption.”
Then she electrified (just kidding) the Ukrainian public with the teaser that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry might visit Ukraine this spring (as opposed to U.S. President Barack Obama, who isn’t showing up).
Reality check: Zero remains the number of people jailed for mass murder of 100 EuroMaidan Revolution demonstrators two years ago or for high financial crimes. And that’s the way President Petro Poroshenko wants it.
These two statements alone by Biden and Nuland, nine months apart, point to the stillborn “fight” against corruption under Poroshenko, who no longer has Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk to kick around.
Poroshenko has no intention of putting corrupt people in jail or creating a truly independent criminal justice system – from police to prosecutors to courts. Why? Because he and too many of his oligarch friends and cronies could end up in prison.
The latest proof came with the trial balloon floated by Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, a Yatsenyuk holdover in the Cabinet of Ministers, to create an anti-corruption court. The fact that Petrenko is now just getting around to proposing such a court – which has worked in other nations — is strange. Ukraine’s post-EuroMaidan Revolution government has known from the beginning that most of the nation’s 9,000 judges are corrupt or politically subservient and incapable of delivering justice. Yatsenyuk even said so.
But this latest proposal, just like the reshuffling of the government under new Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and ministers this month, is designed to create the appearance that Ukraine is entering the new spring with new hope and new leadership and new momentum. Everything is new, new, new, don’t you see? Except that is, for unpunished corruption, which is old, old, old.
Progress will come in some areas, but not in the criminal justice system. Using the recent past as a guide, here’s what will happen with the creation of the anti-corruption court: It will get approved after a long and tortuous debate in parliament. Amendments will be slipped in to ensure that verdicts reached in the non-corrupt independent courts can be reversed in the corrupt and politically dependent courts.
Then there will be a months-long fight over the makeup of the commission that appoints the independent judges. Then there will be a further months-long open, transparent and competitive search process for the judges that will yield – like the search new prosecutors – no fresh talent because there will be no money to pay them. Enjoy the weather, at least.
