The civic coalition “Reanimation Package of Reforms” welcomes the Government’s decision to announce in December 2015 a repeat call for candidates to fill in the remaining vacancies in the National Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP).

We call on the Selection Panel and the Government to comply with the requirements on conflict of interests prevention and proper reasoning of decisions about candidate selection. Violations of these requirements that took place before in the panel’s work have already undermined previous selection results and led to their challenging in court.

In January 2016 member of parliament Viktor Chumak turned down the position of the NACP member, as legally the Agency had not been set up yet and Mr Chumak did not assume the office. This is not the case of early termination of powers of an  Agency’s member as stipulated in Article 5 of the Corruption Prevention Law, with the latter requiring a new selection process to be launched.

Therefore we urge the Government to repeal its decision on appointment of Mr. Chumak to the NACP as not implemented, and also to extend as soon as possible the ongoing selection to the new additional vacancy. Protracting such decision will result in further delay with forming the fully functional NACP.

Appointment of only four out of five members of the Corruption Prevention Agency may be insufficient to effectively launch the new anti-corruption institution, any decision of which requires at least three votes. In its official statement in the beginning of January 2016 concerning the Government’s delay with launching the NACP and new asset disclosure system, the EU Delegation in Ukraine noted that the Agency should be set up and running before 1 April 2016 and that this includes appointment of all five Agency’s members. We therefore call to use the ongoing repeat selection process, choose the candidates and fill in all three existing vacancies in the NACP.