Tables Turned On Anticorruption Activists In Ukraine
By Christopher Miller
KYIV -- Ukraine's revolutionary electronic asset-declaration system has been praised by the country’s Western partners and local anticorruption activists as a crowning achievement of the post-Maidan government.
But those same partners and activists have more recently warned that the transparency project is being undermined and used as a tool to quash the work of government critics.
Alarm bells began ringing well before Ukrainian lawmakers on April 3 failed to pass laws that would abolish subsequent e-declaration requirements for activists and NGOs who fight against entrenched corruption that were signed into law by President Petro Poroshenko last summer.
Proponents of the NGO requirements argued they were needed to promote transparency.
But the U.S. State Department and European Union representatives said otherwise of the NGO requirements, and urged Ukrainian officials to repeal them as soon as possible. They said the requirements would put undue burdens on those NGOs and activists, and hamper their work.
The e-declaration system was designed to help prevent corruption by granting the public and anticorruption watchdogs access to income and asset information of Ukrainian public servants who are involved in handling money from the state budget.
The alarms are growing louder now.
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Here is today's map of the latest situation in the Donbas conflict zone, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. (CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)
