Key facts
- Six of seven members on each prosecutorial selection panel will be prosecutors appointed by their superiors, per the bill.
- The bill creates an Ethics Standards Council to check candidates for the Council of Prosecutors and the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission.
- A majority of Ethics Standards Council members will also be prosecutors, according to the bill.
- The bill sets no competitive contest for the prosecutor general's position, which the EU has asked to depoliticize.
- Vitaly Shabunin of the Anti-Corruption Action Center said the bill entrenches "Kravchenko's prosecutorial scumbags" in the system.
Ukraine's parliament passed the first reading of a prosecution reform bill on November 11. The bill must pass a second reading and be signed by the president before it becomes law.
The bill would restore competitive selection procedures for top prosecutorial jobs, with the exception of the prosecutor general. Restoring such contests is a European Union requirement under Ukraine's talks to join the bloc. The procedures were eliminated in 2025 under a law that also removed prosecutors' procedural independence and the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies. The clause on anti-corruption agencies was later annulled, but the provisions on the prosecution service remained in force.
Anti-corruption activists and legal experts criticized the bill because it provides no role for independent or international experts. Selection panels for prosecutorial contests would be created by the Council of Prosecutors, the service's self-governing body, and six of seven members on each panel would be prosecutors appointed by their superiors. A new Ethics Standards Council would check the integrity of candidates for the Council of Prosecutors and the Qualification and Disciplinary Commission, with a majority of its members also prosecutors.
Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center's executive board, wrote on Facebook that the bill includes no procedure for purging corrupt or compromised prosecutors and that incumbent prosecutors would run the selection processes. He said the bill "actually makes things worse" by entrenching "the likes of Kravchenko's prosecutorial scumbags" in the system.
The bill is seen as the authorities' response to Operation Carthage, a National Anti-Corruption Bureau investigation into scam call centers, drug trafficking, counterfeit currency and violence. The probe led to the ouster of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who fled Ukraine in September, and implicated senior officials in his office. Members of the criminal group bribed prosecutors, police officers and Security Service officials, according to the NABU.
The EU has called for making the selection of the prosecutor general less political and more merit-based. In June, Anastasia Radina, head of parliament's anti-corruption committee from President Volodymyr Zelensky's party, submitted a bill to choose the prosecutor general through a transparent contest with international experts; the authorities have declined to consider it. A similar EU-linked dispute arose in September over a law on integrity declarations for judges passed in June, which the judicial watchdog Dejure said would make it easier for judges to evade accountability for false statements.