What the law is about
The
new adopted
law has a number of strong points.
One of the very important ones is that the unified register of people who
have committed corruption offenses, becomes open to the public.
Previously, the Ministry of Justice used its traditional excuse to
brush off any prying eye by insisting that information the register
contains personal data, which is not available for free public
use.
Moreover, the new
law states that declaration of income and assets by public officials
has to be made available fully on the Internet. And the low threshold of expenses officials incur and have to declare was reduced
to Hr 150,000, or almost two-fold.
Thirdly, the law
introduces mandatory anti-corruption expertise of all the decisions
taken by the authorities. In parliament, the relevant committee for
fighting corruption will be obliged to conduct this expertise of all
proposed bills.
Currently,
this procedure is only required to be conducted by the Ministry of
Justice, and is only limited to the bills filed by the Cabinet of
Ministers. To get around this requirement, all corrupt schemes were introduced to laws
through initiatives of parliament deputies.
Another
novelty is a new control mechanism over public officials’ income
declarations. Unfortunately, it’s going to be very weak to start
with. Special departments to prevent and identify cases of corruption
will be created within certain government bodies.
Within
their scope of powers, they will be able to inspect officials for
conflicts of interests, as well as check information in officials’ income
declarations. Until now, nobody has followed up on information that appeared in income declarations.
What’s
missing?
The
big question now is whether this law is enough. The answer is,
unfortunately, no. Among the problems that have not been addressed
are three very important ones.
First
of all, financial supervision over declarations will be entrusted to
internal control departments, which are actually dependent on the
authorities. They neither have the knowledge, nor recourses to
exercise this control, especially in terms of checking foreign
assets of public officials. Besides, it is very likely that only the
declarations of the officials who are out of favor will be checked.
Secondly,
there is no liability foreseen for providing untruthful information
in a declaration. Therefore, the officials will continue to lie.
Thirdly,
the issue of civic anti-corruption expertise isn’t regulated by
this law. Yet our analys shows that 70 percent of corruption cases
in new bills are dug up by civic activists and journalists.
However,
the new law creates neither a system for civic anti-corruption
expertise, nor procedures for implementing results of such expertise undertaken independently.
What
is the role of the community?
Adoption
of this law is a true achievement of the civil society. Throughout
the year, Transparency International Ukraine and the Coalition in
Support of the Open Government Partnership have been working hard to
promote the idea among parliament members. They have actually written
the text of the bill in cooperation with the deputies.
The
EU and other international partners have forced the Verkhovna Rada
to vote for this bill. Chestno, a civic campaign for personal
voting in parliament, checked that deputies pressed the buttons
personally.
Now
President Viktor Yanukovich has to take his turn – he can either
sign the law or send it back to parliament with his own remarks.
It is important to ensure that we get this signature from the
president.
What’s
next?
We
are now moving into the phase of forcing the authorities to make
the law work.
The
authorities have to dedicate special sections on their agencies’
websites to income declarations.
The
Ministry of Justice has to open access to the register of corruption
offenders. The parliament’s anti-corruption committee should create
an efficient civic expert council, which will produce
anti-corruption expertise.
The
National Agency for Civic Service should develop regulations on
revealing conflicts of interests and organizing financial control
over declarations.
And
civic activists should make use of all the new opportunities. We
have even more work to do than before the law had been adopted.
Oleksii
Khmara is the Executive
Director of Transparency International Ukraine.
