How To Fight Corruption in Ukraine

What You Need To Know:

✓ “The only way to assure sustainability is producing real transformation on the structures and the culture of the people;”

✓ Simply targeting the ‘bad guys’ will not bring about a transformation;

✓ There are principles that should be the base of any efficient judicial system;

✓ It is “possible within the same system to produce a change and generate some significant results.”

“The only way to assure sustainability is producing real transformation on the structures and the culture of the people,” says Jose Ugaz Global Director at Transparency International on Ukraine’s fight against corruption. Ugaz, a former Peruvian prosecutor whose corruption investigation brought down the government of Alberto Fujimori, says that simply targeting the ‘bad guys’ will not bring about a transformation. “If the people don’t understand that living with corrupt practices is not good for the health of the country, increases poverty, increases inequality, generates problems in governance, then sustainable change will not be possible.”

There are principles, he says, that should be the base of any efficient judicial system, and in Bangalore, for example, it is “the independence of the judiciary -- how judges and prosecutors are appointed without political interference and the profile of independent actors for judiciary or prosecutor offices is basic.”

While corruption in Ukraine in systemic for the most part, Ugaz says that it is still possible to make small changes. Giving the example of Brazil, where prosecutors and judges put the country’s top CEOs into prisons, there is now a difference in the way corruption is being addressed. “There’s always a moral reserve like these courageous prosecutors,” he says adding that it is “possible within the same system to produce a change and generate some significant results.”

Hromadske International spoke to Jose Ugaz, Transparency International Global Director in June 2016 in Kyiv.