EU welcomes Ukrainian law restoring independence to anti-corruption agencies
RussiaFacebookTweetLink
Follow
A host of European leaders welcomed the news that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has signed a law restoring independence to his country's main anti-corruption agencies.
A total of 331 out of 340 lawmakers present voted in favor of the bill on Thursday, forming an overwhelming constitutional majority.
Last week, major anti-government protests broke out across Ukraine after the country's parliament approved a bill that brought the two main bodies – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) – under government control.
The large-scale demonstrations were Ukraine's first major anti-government protests since Russia's 2022 invasion.
When approving the bill last week, Zelensky called it a necessary step to rid the two agencies of 'Russian influence.' Two employees of one of the bodies were arrested last week 'on suspicion of working for Russian special services.'
But on Thursday, the president about-faced, saying in a statement posted to X that he had listened to the Ukrainian people and that the 'right decision' was to reverse the controversial bill.
The law he signed Thursday is a 'guarantee of the proper independent functioning of Ukraine's anti-corruption bodies and all law enforcement agencies,' Zelensky said, adding that the new law will ensure regular polygraph checks for 'all law enforcement personnel who have access to state secrets or have relatives in Russia.'
'This is the right decision. It is very important that the state listens to public opinion. That it hears its citizens. Ukraine is a democracy – without a doubt,' he said.
Ukraine had long been seen as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. The European Union warned Kyiv that it must implement strong anti-graft measures if it wants to join the bloc.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and António Costa, the president of the European Council, both said in identical posts on X that the new law signed Thursday was a 'welcome step.'
'Ukraine's rule of law and anti-corruption reforms should continue. They remain essential for Ukraine's progress on the European path. The EU will continue to support these efforts,' they said.
Kaja Kallas, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, also wrote on social media that 'Ukraine's move to restore powers of anti-corruption bodies demonstrates its resolve to quickly get back on course when European democratic values are at stake.'
'The rule of law and fighting corruption are crucial for any country aspiring to join the EU,' she said.
Diplomats from the EU countries of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden also welcomed the move.
CNN's Ivana Kottasová contributed to this report.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
12 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump plans to meet with Putin as soon as next week, New York Times reports
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump plans to meet in person with Russian President Vladimir Putin as early as next week, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the plan. Trump then plans to meet with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the newspaper reported, adding that the plans were disclosed in a call with European leaders on Wednesday. The White House did not immediately respond to the report but earlier on Wednesday Trump acknowledged that he spoke with European leaders after U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff's "highly productive" meeting with Putin in Russia. While noting that "great progress" was made during the meeting, Trump wrote on Truth Social: "Everyone agrees this War must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come." Trump, who promised to end Russia's war in Ukraine on "day one" during his presidential campaign, has held several phone calls with Putin and has met with Zelenskiy since returning to the White House in January. However, in recent weeks, he has become increasingly frustrated with Moscow over a lack of progress towards ending the three-year conflict.
Yahoo
12 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Putin meets Trump envoy as Ukraine peace deadline looms
Vladimir Putin met Thursday with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff amid President Donald Trump's looming Friday deadline for the Russian strongman to start talking peace with Ukraine. Trump hailed the meeting as 'highly productive' and claimed 'great progress' was made, without elaborating. 'Everyone agrees this war must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come,' Trump posted on his social media site. The president didn't mention his deadline for Putin to start taking unspecified steps toward ending his war with Ukraine, raising obvious questions about whether the threat is still hanging over the Kremlin. A Kremlin spokesman said the meeting lasted three hours and was 'useful and constructive.' The spokesman suggested Putin presented some kind of proposal for Witkoff to convey to Trump, but did not elaborate. Trump last week set a stricter deadline of '10 or 12 days' for Putin to wind down the war against Ukraine or start peace negotiations and threatened 'severe tariffs' and other economic penalties against Russia and its economic partners if it refuses. Moscow had so far shrugged off Trump's deadline as empty bluster, noting that he has given numerous previous ultimatums on various issues that turned out to be toothless threats. Russia believes it has the upper hand on the battlefield, at least in the short and medium term, giving it little reason to agree to even a brief ceasefire. Its troops have made modest advances along the long front line in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and ousted Ukrainian troops from a sliver of a Russian border territory that they had previously seized. Russia has also mounted increasingly deadly missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets. Earlier, Witkoff took an early morning stroll in Moscow with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's envoy for investment and economic cooperation, which was captured in footage aired by a Russian news agency. Dmitriev played a key role in three rounds of direct talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine, as well as discussions between Russian and U.S. officials. The negotiations made no progress on ending the three-year war following Russia's invasion of its neighbor. Trump has recently flip-flopped to a much harsher stance on Russia after seeing Putin spurn his demands for concessions for months. But Trump has shown himself to be unwilling to take a firm stance of defending Ukraine and sticking to it, giving Putin an incentive to wait out any threats. The new deadline and threat to impose 'secondary sanctions' on nations that buy Russian energy, like India, China and Turkey, are particularly problematic because those economic powerhouses have no control over Russia's stance on Ukraine. They are unlikely to cut economic ties with Moscow in response to such U.S. demands, especially when Trump himself was cozying up to Putin just a few weeks ago. The White House announced it is tacking on a new 25% tariff on products imported from India, raising the total tax to 50%, which suggests it doesn't consider Putin has met the deadline.
The Intercept
13 minutes ago
- The Intercept
An Unexpected Path to Hold War Criminals Accountable
Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the Capitol to meet with U.S. lawmakers on July 9, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images Tyler McBrien is the managing editor of Lawfare and a 2024-25 Law & Justice Journalism Project Fellow. Many of those watching the horrors unfold in Gaza have hung their highest hopes and deepest frustrations on the world's apex courts: the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Nearly two years into the war, these judicial bodies have neither prevented atrocities from occurring nor punished perpetrators. Journalists and activists amassed ample evidence documenting war crimes committed by the Israeli military, and yet its soldiers continue to operate in Gaza with impunity. It's a mistake to laser-focus on the ICJ, established by the United Nations Charter to settle disputes between states, and the ICC, which prosecutes individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute. Doing so misunderstands and overemphasizes their role. 'The ICC takes up way too much oxygen in discussions of international criminal justice and accountability,' the International Crisis Group's Brian Finucane told me. The myopia also misses important work happening in national courts. It's here at the domestic level where Palestinians have the best chance to see justice, as nation-states attempt to fulfill their international obligations through homegrown investigations and prosecutions. In many ways, the hopes and frustrations lavished on the ICC and ICJ are understandable. 'When people think of international trials, they think of Nuremberg and the signal to the international community that these are the most serious crimes that are being perpetrated,' said Jake Romm, a human rights lawyer and U.S. representative for the Hind Rajab Foundation. Gaza is exactly the kind of grave situation for which these courts were founded, and they have not been completely dormant since October 7, 2023. In early 2024, after South Africa brought a case against Israel alleging that it violated the U.N. Genocide Convention, the ICJ issued several rounds of provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocidal acts, halt military action, and ensure the flow of humanitarian aid. In November that same year, the ICC put out arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (along with three top Hamas commanders) for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. But the wheels of justice in general turn slowly, and, for Palestinians, it can often feel like the wheels of international justice in particular seldom turn at all. The ICJ likely won't rule on the genocide case until the end of 2027 at the earliest. And while the prospects of seeing Netanyahu or Gallant in the dock at The Hague were always dim, they look even dimmer after Hungary, a state party to the Rome Statute, allowed Israel's wanted prime minister safe passage through Budapest, shirking its obligation to arrest him. The ICC also remains embroiled in crisis after its chief prosecutor took leave amid allegations of sexual misconduct, as perennial resource problems and political pressure continue to plague the court and the Trump administration targets the institution with sanctions and other threats. Even special international criminal tribunals, like the ad hoc structures created in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, are subject to a United Nations Security Council veto, an insurmountable hurdle for Palestinians. These international courts have surely not met the moment, but they cannot fight for global justice alone, nor were they designed to. Without an independent enforcement mechanism, international law functions as a voluntary system, dependent on states — as both its subjects and principal agents — to carry it out. And, according to associate professor of criminal law at the University of Milan and senior legal adviser to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights Chantal Meloni, the Rome Statute set out 'a very clear logic that not every international crime committed everywhere in the world can be under the jurisdiction of the ICC, and states have to take their share of the responsibility to prevent and punish these crimes.' National courts, on the other hand, often don't face the same resource constraints and can go after perpetrators up and down the chain of command. The pursuit of justice through domestic courts 'involves potentially hundreds, even thousands of potential suspects as opposed to the ICC, which is only ever going to be dealing with a handful of cases,' said Mark Lattimer, executive director at the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights. While states also face their own political pressures, they do not have to perform the ICC's difficult dance of appeasing its many patrons. Lattimer added that domestic efforts can also 'act as a break on double standards' all too present in international courts, especially for countries with a strong, independent judiciary insulated from prevailing geopolitical power shifts and free to pursue the gravest breaches of international law irrespective of the perpetrator's nationality. Read our complete coverage Efforts to activate domestic jurisdiction for international crimes are not new. A growing body of case law has arisen out of extraterritorial prosecutions in the Syrian war, the Balkan wars, various African conflicts, and, of course, World War II. Countries such as Spain and Belgium already had universal jurisdiction laws, which empower national authorities of any country to investigate and prosecute serious international crimes even if they were committed in another country, in place even before the adoption of the Rome Statute in 1998. Lawyers and activists are building on this historical precedent by pushing for domestic jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute allegations of atrocities by Israel's military in Gaza, the fruits of which have already led to tangible outcomes across several countries. Last month, Belgian authorities detained and questioned two Israeli soldiers on leave at a music festival in response to a legal complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Global Legal Action Network. The episode may have marked the first time national authorities detained Israeli soldiers on suspicion of crimes committed in Gaza, but these 'traveling soldiers,' some of them dual nationals, have faced other consequences. In January, the Israeli foreign minister helped Yuval Vagdani, as a vacationing soldier, escape from Brazil after learning that a federal judge there had opened a war crimes investigation stemming from another Hind Rajab Foundation legal filing. (Vagdani has denied the allegations in the filing.) In addition to filing a complaint with the ICC against more than 1,000 members of Israel's military, the Hind Rajab Foundation has filed complaints and arrest requests with the national authorities of at least 23 countries. In response to these activities and others, the Israeli government issued advisories for soldiers traveling to certain jurisdictions with legal resources and other advice. 'They're spooked,' said Romm. 'National legal systems are coming online to possibly arrest and incarcerate these Israeli soldiers for what they're doing to the Palestinians for the first time in history.' Though no complaint has resulted in a prosecution yet, these cases will likely continue and may even pick up speed. In July, 30 countries convened by The Hague Group committed to supporting 'universal jurisdiction mandates, as and where applicable in our legal constitutional frameworks and judiciaries, to ensure justice for all victims and the prevention of future crimes in the Occupied Palestine Territory.' Of course, the current political environment in several countries make any investigations of Israeli soldiers impossible, regardless of questions of jurisdiction and prosecutorial capacity. In April, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed an urgent request with the Justice Department to prosecute the Israeli soldier Yuval Shatel under U.S. federal law after learning he was spotted in Texas days prior. According to a press release from the foundation, the filing included a dossier of evidence in support of allegations that Shatel committed 'serious violations of international humanitarian law during Israel's military campaign in Gaza.' (Shatel and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment). At the same time, the Hind Rajab Foundation is not naive. The chance of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi directing the Justice Department to investigate its allegations against Shatel seems slim at best, especially since the U.S. War Crimes Act, passed in 1996, laid dormant until December 2023, when the Justice Department indicted four Russians for alleged violations of the federal war crimes statute — the first (and only) prosecution in the law's 30-year history. The apparent unwillingness to apply the statute elsewhere drew criticism as Israel's military campaign in Gaza intensified. On October 21, 2024, Justice Department attorneys wrote a letter to Bondi's predecessor, Merrick Garland, 'calling out the 'glaring gap' between the department's approach to crimes committed by Russia and Hamas — versus the department's silence on potential crimes committed by Israeli forces and civilians.' The Hind Rajab Foundation's request aims to close that gap. 'There is a discrepancy between what the letter of the law says and how the U.S. is acting,' said Romm. 'We filed this because we want them to prosecute, and because they can. They have jurisdiction, and the crimes are very clear.' The Shatel case is HRF's first U.S. prosecution request, but Romm says it won't be the last. 'All I can say is there will be more,' he told me. 'We're going to try to get everyone we possibly can.' 'Despite the fact that this carnage has gone on for almost two years now, it's still, by the standards of justice, in the early days.' There is no statute of limitations for the gravest transgressions of international law. For perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide, the prosecutor's sword of Damocles will hang over them for a lifetime. In December, German courts cleared the way for a 100-year-old former Nazi to stand trial nearly 80 years after the end of WWII. 'Despite the fact that this carnage has gone on for almost two years now, it's still, by the standards of justice, in the early days,' said Finucane. 'When it comes to atrocity crime accountability, there are very long tails, and these things spool over the course of decades.' For anyone demanding justice and accountability for Israel's crimes in Gaza, the message is clear: Let a thousand prosecutions bloom.
