You're reading: Saakashvili adviser says radical changes needed

ODESA, Ukraine -- Zurab Adeishvili is credited with making enormous progress in bringing the rule of law to his native country of Georgia during the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili, now the governor of Odesa Oblast.

Adeishvili served as Georgia’s justice minister, prosecutor general, state security minister and presidential chief of staff.

Now he is advising Saakashvili on creating an independent and effective judicial system, from police to prosecutors and judges, in Odesa Oblast.

Ukraine should take more radical steps to improve the law enforcement system, Adeishvili told the Kyiv Post. Those include the rigorous vetting of judges and prosecutors, dramatic increases in wages and a check on prosecutorial powers through a strong system to investigate their crimes, he said.

The changes should be transparent and involve civil society, Adeishvili said.

Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv have so far failed to create an independent and functioning law enforcement system and are accused of sabotaging the changes.

Corruption cases against both current and former top officials are not being investigated.

Prosecutors have also been dragging their feet on the investigation into the murder of more than 100 protesters during the 2013-14 EuroMaidan Revolution, which ousted disgraced President Viktor Yanukovych.

The prosecutorial reform plan originally drafted by Deputy Prosecutor General Davit Sakvarelidze was more cutting edge than the final blueprint that the Prosecutor General’s Office approved, Adeishvili said, attributing this to “sabotage.” The changes include laying off prosecutors and appointing new ones in a competitive hiring process.

“The layoffs should have been more dramatic,” Adeishvili said. “Ukraine doesn’t need more than 5,000 prosecutors.” Currently, there are plans to reduce the number of prosecutors from 18,000 to 12,000.

Also, the General Inspection Service, whose goal is to investigate prosecutors’ crimes, is smaller and has fewer functions than Sakvarelidze intended, Adeishvili said.

“The General Inspection Service is the main accelerator of reforms,” he said. “If it doesn’t have functions for fighting corruption, there will be no result.”

He also opposed the rule that doesn’t allow people without prosecutorial experience to apply for new rank-and-file prosecutorial jobs. In Georgia, those without prosecutorial experience were eligible, and about 70 percent of old prosecutors were replaced, Adeishvili added.

He also said that prosecutors’ functions should be drastically reduced, and their oversight over civil law cases should be abolished.

Less promising are efforts to improve the judicial system. Almost two years since the EuroMaidan Revolution began, not a single judge has been fired under a law intended to cleanse the government of Yanukovych-era officials. “There has been no court reform and no reform of auxiliary institutions like forensics,” Adeishvili said.

Ukraine, with a population of 44 million people, has 12,000 judges but should only have at most 4,000, he said. Georgia, with a population of 3.7 million people, had just 230 judges following changes Saakashvili’s team’s made.

Georgia abolished the old courts, created new ones and replaced about half of the judges, Adeishvili said.

To give meaning to reform, Adeishvili said incentives should be given to law enforcement officials, including judges and prosecutors, by raising wages and thus discouraging corruption.

In Georgia, the average monthly wage for prosecutors was increased by about 15 times to $1,500, he said.

“In Ukraine, wages have been decreasing, not increasing,” Adeishvili added. “Reform without raising wages is not a reform, it’s the opposite.”

Additionally, Ukraine should make it easier to confiscate the property of corrupt officials and conduct plea bargains, he stated.

In Georgia, 90 percent of criminal cases ended in plea bargains, and 60 percent of such cases were completed within one month due to the changes, he added.

Another must-do is to start jailing corrupt officials regardless of whether they are in the opposition or the incumbent government, he said.

“We convicted 30 prosecutors in our first two years in office, as well as 5 percent of all prosecutors and 10 percent of judges,” Adeishvili said.

Ministers, governors, mayors and lawmakers linked to the ruling party have also been convicted, he said.

“If there are double standards, and if there is impunity, there will be no real results,” Adeishvili added.

But “resistance in Ukraine is greater than in Georgia because there bureaucracy was more disorganized… here they are a very organized force and know how to block reforms” he said.”

It was also easier to pass the necessary legislation in Georgia because in the “Ukrainian parliament, there is no consolidation of pro-reform forces,” he said.

He added that there is a “lack of legislative leadership” in Ukraine. “If parliament has no legitimacy for carrying out reforms, reforms become meaningless,” he said. “The problem is that there are few people in parliament who want to carry out systemic reforms.”

Yet in Georgia, some changes weren’t fully carried out. The outcome was that prosecutors and judges became increasingly subservient to the government and later opened political cases against Saakashvili’s allies after his ouster from power, according to Adeshvili.

Another mistake was that judges weren’t rigorously vetted in Adeishvili’s home country, including polygraph and psychological tests and property checks, he said.

Also, reforms
should be more open and transparent than they were in Georgia, and civil society’s role should be bigger,
Adeishvili said.

He proposed
developing the institution of community prosecutors.

“If a prosecutor
doesn’t want to investigate something, there must be some independent mechanism
when society interferes and an investigation begins,” he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected]