Building anti-corruption institutions from nothing

After 2014 Ukraine created a bureau to investigate high-level corruption, a specialised prosecutor's office to direct those investigations, an agency to verify officials' asset declarations, and eventually a dedicated court to try the cases.

Why a separate architecture was necessary

Because the existing law enforcement and judicial system could not credibly investigate the people who influenced it. That is not a criticism unique to Ukraine; it is the standard problem anywhere that high-level corruption is systemic. An institution investigating the powerful must be insulated from the powerful, and insulation has to be designed in.

How the insulation was attempted

Competitive selection of leadership with international participation on the panels. Fixed terms that do not align with political cycles. Separate budget lines. Their own investigative capacity rather than reliance on existing services. And for the court, a selection process in which an international expert council could veto candidates who failed integrity checks.

That last mechanism was genuinely unusual. A sovereign state accepting that foreign experts can block its judicial appointments is a significant concession, and it was made because the alternative — appointments through the existing system — would have produced a court that could not do the job.

Assessing it honestly

These institutions have been under sustained pressure since they were created: attempts to change their leadership, to narrow their jurisdiction, to remove their independence through legislation. Some of those attempts partially succeeded and were then reversed, usually when external partners made the reversal a condition of something.

They have brought cases against people who would previously have been untouchable, and secured convictions. They have also been slower and more contested than their designers hoped.

My assessment, from the outside and from a business perspective: they changed the calculation. Not to zero risk of impunity, but from near-certainty of it. In this domain that is a large distance travelled.

I know something of what building an institution from nothing means from building companies: writing the mandate is easy and finding and protecting the people who will use it is hard. That is why how the insulation was designed matters. An honest assessment is not something I am placed to give — but the logic of the design is legible to an outsider.