They, like the pigeons, hope that the outside pressure — in the politicians’ case, from Ukrainian society, from true reformers in their midst and from Western backers — will go away quickly so they can return to their cozy spots.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk seized the opportunity of U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker’s visit to Kyiv in October to announce a bold anti-corruption plan: Fire all 9,000 judges in the nation.
Yatsenyuk, as with so many of his pronouncements, leaves people with more questions than answers. Why did he wait until October 2015 to come up with this idea? How does he know all the judges are rotten? Who will replace the rotten judges fired? If all the judges went away in a day, would chaos ensue?
Yatsenyuk is, unquestionably, on to something, though. The nation’s judges are almost universally viewed as corrupt and politically subservient. No one would entrust their fate with them. I am sure that among the 9,000 judges, there are honest ones, but who knows which ones are the honest ones?
But Yatsenyuk picked a strange area for his new focus.
He has no control over the judiciary as he repeatedly says when asked about his ineffectiveness in fighting corruption. He would have to get parliament’s approval, raising more questions: What will he do to persuade and lobby the 80 members in his People’s Front party and the other members of the ruling coalition to pass legislation to fire and replace judges? Or was Yatsenyuk’s statement just another one of the many pronouncements over the years that sound good, but get forgotten the next day?
Other aspects of Yatsenyuk’s understanding of how a criminal justice system should work are also suspect.
When he keeps getting the question about why Ukraine’s post-EuroMaidan Revolution government has not put anybody in jail, he often responds that it’s “not the government’s job.”
Nonsense. Judges, prosecutors and police are part of the government – in fact, the only institution that has the power to deprive people of freedom and enforce the law is the government. And don’t tell me a prime minister has no control over the judicial branch. Setting the government budget alone, including salaries of law enforcers, has direct bearing on the fight against crime and corruption.
The Yatsenyuk plan on Ukrainian public salaries is to get more Western money.
“No doubt, we have to increase wages and salaries, and that’s what we discussed with the secretary,” Yatsenyuk said with Pritzker by his side. “If a public servant gets $100 per month, for example in customs clearance unit, what is going to happen? He will take bribes. We ask our European friends to facilitate the donor’s fund for wages and salaries for high profile officials, and those can really implement reforms for the country.”
As an American who lives in and loves Ukraine, I do not support any financial aid to police, courts and prosecutors until politicians put a truly independent and effective judicial system in place that prioritizes the prosecution of politically motivated murders and major white-collar crimes.
It’s worth parsing a revealing statement that Yatsenyuk made in September at Victor Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy conference. When asked by BBC’s Stephen Sackur to name one “big fish” that has been brought to justice in his time as prime minister, Yatsenyuk could not. He went on to say this:
“As the prime minister, during the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, I allowed the homeland security department to arrest the minister and first deputy minister of emergency service. They were arrested for corruption allegations,” Yatsenyuk said. “I can provide you with the list of those who were arrested, but once again I am not the chief justice. In two days, they were released on bail under the Ukrainian legislation. So we are doing our job. Please, I am not responsible for the prosecutor’s office nor the judiciary.”
In a democracy where leaders proclaim there’s an independent judicial system, since when is it a prime minister’s job to allow or not allow police to arrest someone?
The answer is, of course: Ukraine doesn’t have an independent judicial system and politicians meddle regularly.
Yatsenyuk made a clear point of saying that he is “not responsible for the prosecutor’s office nor the judiciary.” But he didn’t mention police, for which he clearly admitted he has influence, and which he most certainly does through Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, a political ally.
Yatsenyuk, however, is the lesser guilty party among the nation’s top two officials.
The Yatsenyuk government and Cabinet of Ministers have pushed through reforms that would make many areas of Ukrainian government more transparent and less corrupt, from raising energy tariffs to creating a public register of real estate properties and an electronic system of state purchases.
President Petro Poroshenko remains, disappointingly, the biggest obstacle to a genuine corruption fight, bigger than Yatsenyuk.
But even he is feeling pressure, so he has to flap his wings and jump around like the pigeons, in an attempt to create the illusion of progress.
A day after 200 demonstrators went to Poroshenko’s mansion to demand that he fire the ineffectual Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, the president gave an interview to three TV stations in which he promised – yet again – a big fight against corruption.
Poroshenko has pledged such a fight since his inauguration of June 2014, even coining his approach to government, as deoligarchization, demonopolization, debureaucratization. Since none of the three has come to pass (progress has been made in deregulation, a form of debureaucratization), Poroshenko has had to stop repeating the motto.
It didn’t help his cause recently when Novoye Vremya’s new rating of Ukraine’s richest showed that the president’s wealth surged 20 percent, to nearly $1 billion, in a year that was one of misery and economic hardship for most Ukrainians. For the most part, however, the same faces were on top of Ukraine’s economic pyramid. This is the same president who, of course, promised to sell his assets. He has not done so. Moreover, he does business in Russia, a nation at war with the country he leads.
Ukraine’s officials have to, however, make it appear they are doing something. So most anything will do.
Hence, the Halloween arrest of Gennady Korban, an ally of billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, who is suspected of organized crime, embezzlement, kidnapping and hijacking charges.
“Nobody will stop with Korban. Nobody is protected from investigation and responsibility for corruption – neither the new government, nor the old one. The country will hear more surnames brought to justice shortly,” the president told TV journalists, according to his website.
Great. If Korban is guilty, let him get justice and his deserved punishment. But, considering that he is a political rival of Poroshenko, his arrest smacks again of selective justice, just as the arrest of Radical Party lawmaker Ihor Mosiychuk did on bribery charges in September.
Or it could be no justice at all. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for either Korban or Mosiychuk to be brought to trial, either.
The secretive Shokin then called a news conference on Nov. 2, when, in between jokes and pompous remarks, he announced that the Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General’s Office had tried to serve summonses on lawmakers Oleksandr Vilkul, Natalya Korolevska and Vadym Novynsky – ex-allies of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych – in the Verkhovna Rada on Nov. 2. The announcement is also part of the show, designed to create the illusion of evenhanded justice – see, I’m going after everyone! The reality is that Ukrainian justice is ham-handed, not evenhanded.
Poroshenko is quickly killing his political future by clinging to Shokin and he should not be surprised if the “Poroshokin” label sticks to him like glue. Meanwhile, massive bank fraud, embezzlement and mass murder keep going unpunished in this nation.
And, when it comes to appointing an anti-corruption prosecutor, Vitaliy Shabunin of the nation’s Anti-Corruption Action Center said that Poroshenko has decided that controlling the appointee (through Shokin) is more important than his relationship with Western partners – the United States and European Union – who are demanding a truly independent anti-corruption prosecutor beholden to no one and with the resources to do the job.
But changing the prosecutor is not enough, said Bohdan Vitvitsky, at an anti-corruption forum hosted on Nov. 3 by the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council in Kyiv. Because of corruption in the judiciary, an anti-corruption court needs to be established, analogous to one that worked well in Peru, he said.
Vitvitsky said that Ukraine’s Soviet-era isolation means that people were never exposed to the proper standards and proper “informal rules” of behavior, including a judicial system that delivers justice and not politically-ordered verdicts. When one questioner asked him whether better education might be part of the solution, Vitvitsky – a former federal prosecutor in America – recalled the convictions and jail terms he obtained during his career against lawbreakers. “When you put somebody away for 12 years, that had a huge educational impact,” Vitvitsky said.
But for Ukraine’s top two leaders, it is far safer and more preferable to keep control of do-nothing, subservient and corrupt prosecutors, police and judges than to risk the nightmare scenario that they or their political allies could actually face criminal investigations and justice from a truly effective and independent criminal justice system.
The EuroMaidan Revolution was won by collective revulsion to Yanukovych, including from oligarchs, helping people power triumph with support of the West. This time, however, the equation is different. It’s people power + Western pressure + reformist pressure going up against the top power structure + oligarchs + bureaucracy.
This is a big fight. Victory is not ensured.
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected].
