After Operation Carthage, the prosecution service needs a clean-up. Why draft law No. 16144 won’t help

Operation Carthage, conducted by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO), has once again exposed how rotten the law enforcement system and the prosecution service are. While the first part of the operation uncovered how prosecutors were enriching themselves by shielding fraudulent call centres, the second part shocked the public by revealing how deeply the criminal underworld has taken root within the police, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), and the prosecution service.

It turned out that those who were supposed to protect people from criminal organisations were not merely profiting systematically from fraudulent call centres and drug trafficking. They were, quite simply, helping criminal groups to hunt down people, using their official powers and resources to do so.

It is clear that, under these circumstances, simply dismissing officials from their posts, even SSU generals, or suspending prosecutors and police officers is not enough. Proceedings to bring these individuals to justice have begun, but this will be a lengthy process.

Meanwhile, within the prosecution service, the SSU, and the police, there remain hundreds of employees who obediently carried out unlawful orders and were, at best, a silent part of the system and, at worst, knowing accomplices.

Serhii 'Kanzler' Kropyva, a protégé of former Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko and the organiser of the protection scheme for call centres, for example, personally conducted interviews with candidates for senior positions in the prosecution service.

These people remain in their posts.

Anton Kravchuk, the SSU general who has already been dismissed, was in fact head of the SSU's internal security. In other words, he was responsible for identifying staff lacking integrity and offenders within the Security Service.

His associate, Major General Serhii Duka, was the first deputy head of the Department for the Protection of National Statehood. He commanded hundreds of operatives tasked with countering systemic threats to national security. However, materials published by NABU indicate that Duka was, on the contrary, the very embodiment of these threats.

That is why real change requires systemic solutions. Their cornerstone must be independent and transparent competitive selection procedures within the prosecution service and law enforcement agencies, along with effective tools for cleaning up these institutions.

NABU and SAPO prove the point. Their leaders and staff are appointed through truly independent competitions, and they have become perhaps the only institutions in the country able to curb law enforcement abuses and large-scale corruption. And this despite being the smallest institutions in the system and facing constant persecution from the politically controlled SSU and prosecution service because of their work.

As Oleksandr Abakumov, head of the NABU detective unit, pointed out to Ukrainska Pravda, there are currently only around 900 people working on these tasks across NABU and SAPO.

Yet it is already clear that President Zelenskyy and his inner circle see preserving 'manual control' over the SSU, the prosecution service, the National Police, and the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) as their priority.

The price society continues to pay is a rotten system. But while politicians will sooner or later change through elections, law enforcement agencies and the prosecution service critically need competitive selection processes and tools to clean up their ranks.

For now, however, key legislative changes concerning the prosecution service and law enforcement agencies are either on hold or replaced by smoke and mirrors.

First and foremost, this concerns draft law No. 16144, which Zelenskyy's government submitted to parliament in October with great fanfare under the hollow title 'On amending certain legislative acts of Ukraine regarding the improvement of the organisational framework for the activities of the prosecution service, ensuring the institutional independence of the prosecution self-governing bodies and the body responsible for disciplinary proceedings'.

MPs are planning to vote on it at first reading today, on 10 November.

However, the draft makes no mention of either cleaning up the prosecution service or independent selection processes.

Instead, the proposed changes merely cement the existing system of mutual cover-up, as they effectively leave all staff selection decisions in the hands of the prosecutors themselves and their management.

There are no clean-up procedures at all, such as the re-attestation currently provided for the Economic Security Bureau and the Customs Service. According to the draft's authors, prosecutorial self-governance will improve through the creation of a Council of Ethical Standards (CES), which will assess the integrity and professional competence of members of the Council of Prosecutors (the key body of prosecutorial self-governance) and the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission of Prosecutors (QDCP).

Yet decisions in the newly established CES will also be controlled by people from the prosecution service. In the end, all this can only entrench the problems, not solve them.

Instead, the first and most important thing needed for change within the prosecution service is an independent competition for the position of Prosecutor General and legislative safeguards against political dismissal.

Without an independent selection process, the Prosecutor General remains a political appointee. In practice, this means one thing: appointment to the post is possible only in exchange for complete loyalty to the President and the political forces that have approved the appointment.

And vice versa, any actions aimed at investigating the activities of the political elite or at cleaning up the system will inevitably result in dismissal.

The latest striking example is the complete disregard for the law by the last two heads of the Office of the Prosecutor General (OPG): the fugitive Ruslan Kravchenko and the acting Prosecutor General Anton Kovalskyi. Both refused to initiate criminal proceedings against Davyd Arakhamia, the leader of the Servant of the People parliamentary faction.

These politically appointed officials refused even to register the case and allow NABU and SAPO to at least begin an investigation into the individual who is, in all likelihood, behind the distribution of cash envelopes in parliament.

Such an investigation threatens specific politicians who are essential to the manually controlled system.

This was rectified solely through judicial oversight, specifically by the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC), whose judges were also appointed following an independent selection process involving international experts. This happened after the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) filed a complaint with the HACC.

Instead of advancing the justice system, cleaning up the prosecution service, and introducing new standards, the Prosecutor General is becoming an obstacle to investigations and a guarantor of immunity for certain individuals.

Experience shows that even strong loyalty to the authorities guarantees a Prosecutor General nothing at all. Even loyal Prosecutors General end up as scapegoats for politicians. Just recall how former Prosecutors General Andrii Kostin and Iryna Venediktova, both quite loyal to the authorities, were dismissed. Both were removed from their posts unexpectedly quickly, unceremoniously, and without any particular explanation.

Although the Constitution stipulates that the term of office for the Prosecutor General is a full six years, in practice, it is impossible to remain in this post for longer than one and a half to two years. This is primarily due to the politicised nature of the office and the mechanisms governing appointment and dismissal. Yet one and a half to two years is not even enough time to investigate a case and bring it to court, especially when it comes to organised crime or serious offences, let alone to bring about systemic change in the prosecution service.

No system can operate consistently over such a short period. And this, in particular, explains why critically important investigations often fail to end with the case being sent to court. Meanwhile, criminals often evade punishment and simply switch to paying into the crypto wallets of whichever officials they need to buy off to avoid trouble with the law. Real punishment, by contrast, is reserved for people who steal sausage from supermarkets.

Without ensuring the independence of the key figure within the prosecution service, all other changes are meaningless: neither prosecutorial self-governance nor ordinary prosecutors stand a chance of becoming independent. After all, their head remains a political appointee, a figure who changes every one and a half to two years, bringing with them their own vision of how the work should be done, changes to the rules of the game, and perhaps even a different crypto wallet.

This is why political control and loyalty breed corruption and the protection of 'call centres' instead of ensuring real justice. Those within the system understand all too well that everything could change tomorrow; there is no stability, nor is there any inevitability of punishment. And the values promoted in the country's highest echelons, through mottos such as 'corruption must be controlled and led, not fought', become the rule for survival.

Entirely different approaches and rules apply in systems with independent leaders. The recent special operations carried out by NABU and SAPO – Midas, Themis, Forrest Gump, and Carthage – are striking examples. Independent anti-corruption institutions expose high-ranking officials, bring such cases to court, and secure convictions.

Today, SAPO is the only outpost in the prosecution service with genuinely independent selection procedures for its head, unit heads, and prosecutors. All candidates are selected by independent commissions, which, of course, include prosecutors, but decisions require the mandatory votes of two experts delegated by international partners.

These very mechanisms once kept the fugitive Ruslan Kravchenko out of SAPO and NABU: he failed the integrity checks conducted by the independent commissions but passed the test of political loyalty to the authorities. His first moves as Prosecutor General were an attack on NABU involving mass searches and the cancellation of competitions for senior positions in the prosecution service.

By contrast, prosecutors who have passed the vetting of SAPO's independent commissions are now upholding the charges in court in the most high-profile corruption cases of recent years.

The model proposed by the Zelenskyy government in draft law No. 16144 for all other prosecutors, however, does not stand up to any scrutiny. All influence remains in the hands of people within the system, who are still dependent on a politically appointed head.

• The Prosecutor General remains a political appointee; the Prosecutor General's deputies are also appointed without any selection procedures.
• The heads of departments within the Office of the Prosecutor General will be selected by commissions established by the politically appointed Prosecutor General from among the management of the Office of the Prosecutor General and one representative of the Council of Prosecutors (6 members from the management of the Office of the Prosecutor General + 1 from the Council of Prosecutors).
• The heads of regional and district prosecutor's offices, as well as their deputies, are to be selected by the Council of Prosecutors (comprising 15 prosecutors at various levels: 3 from the Office of the Prosecutor General, 7 from district prosecutor's offices, 4 from regional prosecutor's offices, and 1 SAPO representative).
• The heads of departments within regional prosecutor's offices, deputy heads of district prosecutor's offices and heads of departments within district prosecutor's offices will be selected by commissions established by regional prosecutors, comprising 6 managers from the relevant prosecutor's offices and 1 representative of the Council of Prosecutors.

Ultimately, it is not even a question of prosecutors holding the majority; in such a model, there is simply no room for anyone from outside the system.

The independence of the Council of Prosecutors is supposedly to be ensured by the integrity and professional competence checks on candidates, which will be carried out by the newly established Council of Ethical Standards.

However, the composition of the Council of Ethical Standards can hardly be described as independent; rather the opposite. It is proposed that, for the first two years, it should operate with a provisional composition of 6 members: 3 prosecutors from the Council of Prosecutors and 1 representative each from the Council of Judges, the Presidium of the National Academy of Legal Sciences, and the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights. Decisions are to be taken by a majority of 4 votes.

This composition and decision-making procedure look like a complete farce, as the representatives not drawn from the prosecutors' quota raise even more questions.

For instance, the Human Rights Commissioner is also an entirely political figure appointed by parliament. The current commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, was a Member of Parliament prior to this appointment. Under current law, the Commissioner appoints 3 members to the QDCP with the consent of the Law Enforcement Committee. In 2024, Lubinets proposed Kateryna Koval, a lawyer with close ties to Oleh Tatarov, the Deputy Head of the President's Office, for the QDCP; for two years, she had been obstructing and delaying the competition for the SAPO head in the interests of the President's Office.

The Council of Judges has repeatedly appointed questionable candidates, for example, to the selection commission for members of the High Qualification Commission of Judges (HQCJ), and has generally been known for systematically protecting the culture of mutual cover-up within the judicial system. At one point, a draft law to abolish it was even registered in parliament.

In two years, the CES composition will be renewed and become permanent, with the majority of votes held by prosecutors delegated by the Council of Prosecutors. A further 3 representatives will be delegated: 1 from the QDCP, 1 from the Bar Congress, and 1 from the Congress of Law Faculties.

The judiciary offers a telling parallel. The first attempts to clean up the judicial system, including the competition for the Supreme Court, failed precisely because candidates could easily explain their luxurious apartments and cars with fantastical stories, such as having earned the money by harvesting strawberries. This was despite the involvement of the Public Integrity Council, which provided its assessments of the candidates.

Only over time, and with the involvement of independent public representatives and international experts with real influence over the process, did approaches to analysing and assessing judicial candidates' integrity begin to change. Even so, the process is still far from ideal.

In the prosecutorial model, by contrast, selection competitions and integrity checks of candidates for the QDCP and the Council of Prosecutors leave no room for independent commission members. The failure of these procedures is therefore most likely only a matter of time.

In addition to these changes, the draft law contains many other nuances and details. The draft law introduces a system for assessing prosecutors' performance, but this will be carried out by the same internal prosecutorial commissions that will select prosecutors. The powers of the Council of Prosecutors will be expanded; it will approve the procedures for the selection and evaluation of prosecutors, while the QDCP will be enlarged through the prosecutors' quota.

Parliament's Law Enforcement Committee has already proposed adopting this draft law as a whole, with the addition of a few minor amendments.

However, all these changes are meaningless for the reasons mentioned above. The only difference is that hand-picked appointments in the prosecution service will be labelled 'independent selection', while members of the Council of Prosecutors and the QDCP will be awarded the prestigious title of 'people of integrity' without any genuine vetting. Once again, the country will waste time and miss an opportunity for real change in the sector.

Olena Shcherban, Deputy Executive Director, Anti-Corruption Action Centre