Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) Artem Sytnyk has said that the next year will show whether the anti-corruption processes in Ukraine will become irreversible.
“Today, all anti-corruption bodies work together and are fused in some way, complement each other. We have reached the highest level of our work in cooperation,” Sytnyk said on Thursday in Kyiv at the Seven Years of Anti-Corruption Reforms conference, timed to coincide with the International Anti-Corruption Day.
According to him, work with international partners has also been established.
“We will continue to work not only with punitive methods, but with methods that are aimed at preventing corruption, at fostering zero tolerance for corruption in society,” Sytnyk said.
At the same time, the director of NABU said that it is too early to assert about the inevitability of anti-corruption processes in Ukraine.
“In the next year, I think we will receive an answer whether the anti-corruption reform in Ukraine is irreversible, whether the results we are getting in very difficult conditions are irreversible,” he said.
According to Sytnyk, for seven years there have been constant attempts to limit the powers of anti-corruption bodies, to deprive them of their powers. “Each anti-corruption body that starts to work actively always receives some kind of decisions – by the parliament or the Constitutional Court – aimed at depriving them of their powers,” the NABU director said.
“We are not stopping our struggle. And, despite the fact that the anti-corruption system is now experiencing a change of leadership, – now it concerns the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, and in the near future it will concern the anti-corruption bureau – I believe that the system itself is formed, effective, institutionally independent and ready for further action,” Sytnyk said.
