Ukraine has managed to deliver significant achievements in the anti-corruption field. The details of Ukraine’s progress and the road ahead in fighting and preventing corruption were discussed during the conference ‘Building Internal Resilience: Corruption Prevention in Ukraine’s Recovery’ in Berlin on 21 May. The event aimed to showcase Ukraine’s efforts in tackling corruption across various sectors, particularly in light of the upcoming Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024 in Berlin.
The event consisted of three workshops and a main panel where Ukrainian, German, and international experts made an honest stocktaking of the achievements, institutional landscape, and reforms in the anti-corruption field since 2014, especially since the start of the full-scale invasion. They also discussed the outstanding challenges and the need to do more to bring down the level of corruption.
The EUACI Head, Allan Pagh Kristensen, became a speaker of the main panel related to the questions of Ukraine's progress in fighting and preventing corruption and the links of the anti-corruption reforms with the EU Accession. Deputy Head, Iryna Shyba, moderated one of the workshops.
Among the speakers were Anastasia Radina, MP, Viktor Pavlushchyk, NACP Head, Oleksandr Skomarov, Head of Detective Department of NABU and Bogdan Kryklyvenko, HACC Chief of apparatus, as well as representatives of Ukrainian CSOs Martyna Bohuslavets, Rise; Anastasia Mazurok, TI Ukraine; Maryna Khromych, DEJURE.
The participants of the event talked about the new anti-corruption infrastructure and merit-based selection processes of their leadership, far-reaching transparency mechanisms such as the ProZorro Procurement platform, the e-declaration system and the key instrument for monitoring the reconstruction, the Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management (DREAM).
Ukraine’s recovery on the national and local levels became a separate line of discussion at the workshops. Experts mentioned that due to successful decentralization reform, even despite the war, the Ukrainian cities managed to make some progress and increased their transparency, according to Transparency International Ukraine research. The recent dismissal of the Deputy Prime Minister Kubrakov had led to some uncertainty as to the future approach to the reconstruction efforts.
The conference was jointly organized by the German-Ukrainian Bureau and Anti-Corruption Action Centre with the support of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative, the German Platform for Reconstruction of Ukraine, the Democracy Reporting International Ukraine, and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW).
More photos here.