At a meeting of the Verkhovna Rada's anticorruption committee on July 9, Pavlo Petrenko, Ukraine's minister of justice and Yehor Sobolev, a chairman of the committee, discussed the ministry's initiatives on extending information to public data through registers.
There are many
registers which are already open, while some remain closed because of
opposition of bureaucrats or technical drawbacks,” Sobolev said.
“The Ministry
of Justice is in charge of 21 registers… Without maximum simplification of
registers any communication between Ministry and Ukrainian citizens would be
ineffective,” added Petrenko.
To increase
transparency in ownership relationships and tackle corruption, the Justice
Ministry drafted a law to open access to all property registers. The bill has
been adopted in the first reading on May 12 and is expected to get final
approval of parliament next week.
Sobolev
believes this is an important step. “It will give opportunity to IT specialists
of non-governmental organizations and mass media to create their own registers
based on the ministry’s ones and compile data,” Sobolev explained.
Apart from
address, registration number and cadastral number – it would be possible to
perform search by the surname of a person. Previously, only authorized persons
– notaries, advocates and state agencies – could perform such a search. The
service fee is Hr 17.
With the help
of a business register for Hr 51, it is possible to obtain data about economic
entities under the following search items: name, registration number, and
surname (name) of director or founder. Search by surname of beneficiary is
temporary inoperable because of technical drawbacks. The ministry expects it to
become available by the end of 2015.
In response to journalists’ complaints about inoperability
of the state register of the persons who have committed
corruption offenses, the ministry extended criteria for search from name and
surname of the corrupt officials to post, sentence, date and number of judicial
decision. In addition, every day the ministry will publish information from the
register, which could be downloaded in a single file for free.
The test mode of extended search will be launched on
July 13. During following week committee and Ministry welcome any comments
regarding its performance.
However, because of absence of any interconnection
between register of judicial decisions and anticorruption register, most of
information is entered in manual mode by Ministry’s employees.
Petrenko says this is because of State Judicial Administration’s
unwillingness to cooperate.
“We proposed State Judicial Administration to
synchronize these two registers but they ignored our request,” Minister said.
“In addition, judicial administration doesn’t send us all decisions on
corruption crimes.”
“Synchronization of these registers is the only way to
eliminate human factor… and it has to be resolved before the register is
transferred to Anti-Corruption Bureau,” Petrenko added.
The registry includes some 10,000 of corrupt officials.
In addition, Justice
Ministry presented its new e-system of registration of births, deaths and marriages. In ten days, it would be possible to schedule an appointment and file documents
via e-cabinet, instead of standing in queues.
Kyiv Post’s legal affairs reporter Mariana Antonovych can be reached at [email protected]
