Parliament gives green way for appointing Yuriy Lutsenko as General Prosecutor

UKRAINE - In Brief 12 May 2016 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Today parliament voted in a law that allows appointing General Prosecutor a person without legal education. This step was presented to the public as an effort to bring on board someone “not from the system”. At the same time critiques blame the authorities that this change in reality was designed simply to appoint Yuriy Lutsenko, comrade of President Poroshenko, for General Prosecutor post. In fact the latter is true. Poroshenko already submitted to the parliament a request to approve Yuriy Lutsenko for the post of General Prosecutor. And if Yuriy Lutsenko has legal education there would be no law about people “not from the system”. So what does this move mean and what kind of implications it might have? No doubt such change of rules just for specific occasion does not give any credit to the authorities. At the same time, Poroshenko would not dare for such step unless it was agreed with western partners. Yuriy Lutsenko is not the worst candidate for the post of General Prosecutor especially compared to Viktor Shokin. Lutsenko was in jail under Yanukovitch regime and he has relatively good reputation. For sure, open competition when selecting prosecutor would be much better; however, Poroshenko cannot risk losing control over General Prosecutor. Thus it was decided to appoint a person who would not attack Poroshenko and his friends and, at the same time, would satisfy western observers. Will Lutsenko start reform of prosecutor’s office? Possibly. However, we should not expect outstanding results from him. When he was Minister of Interior in 2005-2006 it was nothing special in his work. The only good thing about Lutsenko that he will not defend corrupt prosecutors like h...