Ukraine anti-corruption head calls for approving special court in the fall

Ukraine’s parliament must approve the creation of an Anti-Corruption
Court this fall in order for the work of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau
and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor to be effective, said on Aug. 10
Artem Sytnyk, the anti-corruption bureau’s director. The court’s creation is
the main test of the Poroshenko administration to demonstrate that it has the
desire to fulfill anti-corruption reform, Sytnyk said, as reported by the pravda.com.ua news site. “Now they are trying
to deceive our partners with some kind of ‘chambers,’ which will lead to an
even worse result than we currently have in the courts,” he said.

Recall, European Commission Head Jean-Claude Juncker
said in mid-July that his body will no longer require the creation of an
independent anti-corruption court in Ukraine and will be satisfied with an
anti-corruption chambers within the existing judiciary. The announcement was
heavily criticized by Ukraine’s NGO community, as well as Sytnyk.

Zenon Zawada: Ukraine’s
judiciary is so corrupt that the creation of an independent anti-corruption
court is necessary to at least begin the struggle to establish some minimum
standard of rule of law. The court will only be approved by parliament if
Western authorities, like Juncker, make the court’s creation a requirement for
receiving more Western loans, including the next IMF tranche.

We believe it’s likely that authorities will be
convinced of the need to create the independent court, rather than the president’s
proposed anti-corruption chamber. Evidence of this emerged yesterday when the
Ukrainian News agency, relying on anonymous sources, reported that the IMF has
yet to accept the president’s proposal of favoring courts under the existing
judiciary, rather than an independent anti-corruption structure.