Poroshenko appoints judges to new anti-corruption court

Ukrainian President Poroshenko participated in an Apr.
11 ceremony appointing judges to the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine, an
independent judicial body required by the IMF for its latest loan tranche.
Thirty-eight judges took their oaths in the ceremony, 11 of which will serve in
the court’s appellate chamber. The judges will meet within 30 days to determine
when the court’s work will begin. “We have worked for this for three long
years,” Poroshenko said. “We included highly qualified international experts in
the competition procedures – the former judges and prosecutors of Great
Britain, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Macedonia.” The president estimated that
about 42% of the judges were selected from beyond Ukraine’s current judiciary,
which is widely recognized to be plagued by corruption.

Zenon Zawada: The
ceremony was organized for the president’s re-election campaign, but recent
polls indicate it’s too little, too late. The ceremony could also have been
organized to satisfy a demand put forth by Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, an
intellectual rock star who had the same potential to become president as
Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But rather than compete, Vakarchuk is alleged to have reached an agreement
with Poroshenko for two key demands, one of which was the independent court’s
launch by the time of elections.

The president mentioned “three long years” in the
court’s creation, but it didn’t have to be such as arduous process if the president hadn’t put up  so much resistance.
As pointed out by Vitaliy Shabunin of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, the
court has been created “in spite of, and not owing to, the positions of the
highest state officials.”

Despite the destabilization processes a Zelenskiy
presidency will bring, this is one sphere where we expect a better result than
if Poroshenko is re-elected. Zelenskiy has indicated he would allow all the
IMF-inspired bodies – including the independent court, the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office – to
perform their work without interference, and we believe that’s entirely
realistic. It will be a true breakthrough in Ukrainian jurisprudence to see all
these bodies perform as they’re designed, which wasn’t the case under the
Poroshenko administration.