Almost a hundred years ago Ukrainian native lands, the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic were united, and this was a confirmation of Ukraine’s statehood. This is a special day – January 22.
For a millennium Ukrainian ethnic nation has already been living on the lands from the Carpathians to Crimea and actually from the Dnipro rapids to the Krasnodar Territory. But during the past 400 years, the Ukrainian nation has been torn by various interested parties: Austria-Hungary, then Poland, but, basically, by the Russian Empire that tries to absorb the Ukrainian land and assimilate the Ukrainian people in Russia. But finally, in 1991, after the signing of the Belavezha Accords, Ukraine got a chance for its own independence and statehood, so we have got the state. We have got a polynational, polytheistic and polymental state. This means that our country is not united by one religion, one language and one territory, as the modern history proves. What do we all have in common? Why do we live together and have to live on? We can be united only by the perspective of a common wonderful future and the idea of national justice.
It is here and now that we can see how the country is changing, and how the legal system is changing too. The prosecution and judiciary have degraded. Every day we fight against corruption, while actually this is a struggle against the consequence, but not the reason. The reason is that people are doomed to miserable existence. At first the state must fulfil its obligations to the people and ensure decent conditions of life for them, and only then require not taking bribes, judging according to the law, not manipulating the facts and circumstances by the Prosecutor’s Office.
The Prosecutor’s Office, the Prosecutor General – today they have become proverbial. Everyone says that it is necessary to do something, they have created the institution of anti-corruption prosecutor, NABU, many more structures. But what has changed? – Nothing. While actually we do not need to reinvent the wheel. The civilized world has invented everything before us. Today in the world there are two main systems: the French model where the Prosecutor’s Office is under control of the court, and the German model, that is also applied in the United States – where the Prosecutor’s Office is under control of the Ministry of Justice. While our Prosecutor’s Office is a separate independent body. Such atavisms have remained only in our state and other post-Soviet countries.
The prosecutors cannot be in their own rights. They cannot be leaded by the one person. It does not work. Until we have the Prosecutor’s Office as a separate body, as an atavism, as a punitive agency, we will never have an independent judicial system. It is necessary to adopt a model rather than reinvent some amendments to the Constitution, according to which the Prosecutor General could not be removed at all. We go to Europe, and there are two models.
The same works for the courts. How do we carry out the judicial reform? We have seven thousand judges, the courts do not work, the judges are unqualified, and many of them are subject to lustration. We must start from the top. There are three institutions: Supreme Economic Court, Supreme Civil and Criminal Court and Supreme Administrative Court. About a hundred people work in every institution. It means there are three hundred people. Is it possible that all over Ukraine we cannot find 300 experts who would become the judges of the highest category? And then everything is simple. If the judge of first instance has three cancelled decisions during a year, he or she must be automatically dismissed. This is a simple model for judicial reform.
When people are willing to reform something, they just do it, and do not show on TV teachers or nurses caught taking bribes of 5 thousand hryvnias. They’d better show at least the prosecutor Holinchenko caught with two Porsche! But they don’t...
Today is Ukraine’s Unity Day and we need to form a national idea. Yes, we speak different languages, we practice different religions, but we should all be united by a unique Ukrainian national idea. And this idea is our common future on this land.
