The fight against corruption has been a central focus for Ukraine since the 2014 Maidan Revolution. In the immediate aftermath of Maidan, the country created four new institutions, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) (an investigative body), the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) (with prosecutorial powers), the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption (NAPC) (responsible for administering the e-asset declaration system), and the Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA) (tasked with recovering stolen assets). Yet the problem of impunity for grand corruption has persisted, and many believe that the weak link in the chain has been the Ukrainian judiciary. In addition to familiar problems of delay and inefficiency, Ukrainian judges are widely viewed as susceptible to political influence, and even corrupt themselves. To address this problem, in 2018—thanks to the combined lobbying efforts of Ukraine’s vibrant civil society and pressure from international donors, primarily the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—Ukraine enacted a new law creating a specialized anticorruption court known as the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), which began operations this past September.

The most innovative and controversial feature of this new court is the inclusion of foreign experts in the judicial selection process. While many countries have created specialized anticorruption courts, and many of these have special judicial selection systems that differ from the procedures for appointing ordinary judges, the participation of foreign experts in the HACC judicial selection process was unprecedented. Yet both domestic civil society groups and outside actors like the IMF and the Venice Commission (the Council of Europe’s advisory body for legal and constitutional matters) came to see foreign participation in the selection of HACC judges as crucial, particularly in light of the controversial selection process for judges to Ukraine’s Supreme Court in 2017. In the selection to the Supreme Court, multiple candidates were approved by Ukraine’s High Council of Justice (HCJ) despite the fact that those candidates were found to be ethically tainted by the Public Integrity Council (PIC), a civil society watchdog that assists the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ) in assessing the integrity of judicial candidates. Thus, when lobbying for the HACC, civil society and some members of parliament demanded that the law guarantee the presence of foreign experts with the power to veto judicial candidates, in order to ensure that no judges were appointed to the HACC if there was reasonable doubt about their integrity.

As a short-term stopgap, the involvement of foreign experts in the HACC judge selection is promising and may even serve as a useful model for other institutional reforms within Ukraine, and for other countries. But reliance on foreign experts to address concerns about selecting judges (or other officials) of sufficient integrity is probably not a long-term solution. Continue reading →