His demotion or transfer is widely seen as a bone thrown to the West to signal that President Viktor Yanukovych is serious about making the criminal justice system – from police to prosecutors to judges – more independent and trustworthy.
But Kuzmin, the hyper-aggressive prosecutor, wasn’t the problem. He embodied the problem and became the nation’s leading symbol of prosecutorial excess. But he simply worked the Frankenstein-like system for the benefit of his political masters.
The problem, as just about everyone who has looked at the judicial system has concluded, is that politicians don’t want to give up their powers to throw their enemies in prison and insulate their friends – and themselves – with a thick coat of legal impunity so they can continue to plunder and kill if they want.
The center of this axis of evil is the prosecutor’s office. In a nation where judges are not independent and jury trials are non-existent, prosecutors decide all – who gets investigated, arrested, charged and found guilty. It’s not supposed to work like that. A better system has citizens holding the final powers as jurors, with judges elevated in status and pay so that they are immune from political pressures. Police and prosecutors must become more transparent in their work to curb against abuses, and the rights to legal representation of the accused need to be strengthened.
Kuzmin’s name became synonymous with the selective prosecution – or the political persecution – of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymosheno and ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko. But he also made a name for himself with public charges that ex-President Leonid Kuchma ordered the assassination of journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000. But those allegations look like nothing more than public posturing.
Kuzmin’s excesses probably led to his undoing. There were exposes about him living a lavish lifestyle beyond the means of a public servant. And his bulldog approach got him banned from entering the United States. However, Kuzmin did like to talk about cases he investigated – more than most prosecutors. This benefited the journalists and broader public, but did not make the system more transparent.
To change that, a new system needs to be installed, and – apparently – with the new bill on prosecution that received praised from Europe’s Venice Commission, the nation is on the right track. We hope it continues to go down that road.
