The Anti-Corruption agenda for candidates who run for the President of Ukraine

Ukrainian voters stated that corruption is one of three biggest problems in Ukraine. The greatest threat, in their opinion, is grand political corruption, according to more than 90% of Ukrainians. *

Ukrainians lay the greatest responsibility for fighting against corruption upon the President (63%) and the Verkhovna Rada (42%). 80% are convinced that the main reason of corruption is lack of proper punishment for it. *

Leading anti-corruption organizations call on presidential candidates to present their proposals of solving key problems of the state anti-corruption policy. Specifically:

— Complete loss of public confidence in the leadership of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office. How do you ensure dismissal of the head of the SAPO and two his deputies? How do you ensure transparency and effectiveness of the selection of new leadership?

— Failure of management of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention to ensure fulfillment of institution’s functions. How do you ensure full restart of this state authority? How do you ensure absence of political influence on this process?

— Permanent attacks of the political elite on the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. How do you ensure institutional strengthening of the NABU? How do you protect it from constant attempts by the political elite to destroy it?

— Transformation of the part of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) into the tool and the provider of corruption. How do you narrow powers of the Special Service and make them correspond with the NATO standards? How do you restrict its interference into businesses? For instance, will the main department of the SBU on fighting against corruption be dissolved?

There are no doubts that the list of above-mentioned problems is not full. However, absence of clear position among candidates regarding them indicate about misunderstanding of key challenges in the sphere of fighting against corruption.

We call on all presidential candidates to publicly state their vision of overcoming the above-mentioned challenges. As for us, we are ready to take part in such discussions.

* According to the "National Anti-Corruption Survey" conducted by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology within the framework of the program on promoting public activity "Engage!". The survey was carried out in July – August 2018 and covered 10,169 respondents. The theoretical sample error of the survey is 1%. All field work and data processing for this research were conducted by Kyiv International Institute of Sociolog