Page 52 - bne_newspaper_February_02_2018

52 I Eastern Europe bne February 2018
• jurisdiction of the court does not fully cover cases investigated by NABU and on the contrary – covers cases which are not related to (high profile) corruption as such (drug dealing and arms trafficking, which involve officials);
• discriminative eligibility requirements towards international donors who
can nominate advisory experts for the selection of anticorruption judges: only international organizations with which Ukraine cooperates in the field of combating corruption can nominate experts, while foreign aid agencies that provide technical support and funding for anticorruption efforts
are not eligible.
Moreover, experts from a Ukrainian working group that has been advising the government on formulating the law for more than a year were not mentioned in the citations attached to the draft law. Antac said it has never heard of those experts that were cited in the document nor could it find published work by them.
There was no public discussion of the law nor were any civil society bodies involved in drawing up the draft. Despite the claims of the president that OCSE experts were involved, the OCSE itself denied the claims.
“According to official web-site of the
President, his draft law has been devel- oped by a group of experts that included founder of the Fund for Innovations and Development Georgiy Vashadze, director of the same Fund Roman Yakovlev, and scientists and OCSE experts Anatoliy Zayets and Valentyn Serdiuk. However, today Oleksandr Vodyannikov, OSCE representative and a member of the Council for Judicial Reform informed, that the OSCE was not involved in devel- opment of the draft law and that experts
IMF Christine Lagarde said explicitly in December that the new court must take on board all the Vienna Commission recommendations.
In addition, the European Commission in its first report under the Visa Suspen- sion Mechanisms introduced earlier this year stated that it is “critically important to ensure the independence, effective- ness and sustainability of the anticorrup- tion institutional framework, in particu-
“Poroshenko’s version of the law to establish the new court fails to meet the donor’s demands on several counts”
referred to as OSCE experts were only contracted by the organization some time ago and are not representing it now,” Antac said in its note.
Failure to establish an anti-corruption law threatens to derail the provision of further aid money and could cause the EU to rescind its visa-free agreement with the government in Kyiv.
In October 2017 the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe gave a comprehensive opinion on advisable model of the anticorruption court for Ukraine and the general director of the
lar by setting up an independent and specialised high anti-corruption court in accordance with the Venice Commission opinion and Ukrainian legislation.” If the EU reject the draft version submitted to the Rada this week then the visa waiver programme may be nixed.
The government dependence on the IMF and other donors has been significantly reduced this year after Kyiv was able to tap the international capital markets starting with a $3bn bond in September, but also several smaller foreign currency bonds issued on the domestic market in the subsequent months.
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