Judicial and Anticorruption Reform, and Ukraine’s Path to EU Accession

• In Event: Ukraine beyond the Battlefield: Domestic Politics and the Road to EU Accession

Abstract

When Ukraine received EU candidate status in June 2022, the EU identified seven conditions that Ukraine needs to meet to open accession negotiations and five out of them focus on judicial and anticorruption reform. While Ukraine has been working on both reforms since 2014 and has put in place an extensive, new institutional architecture, the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion has put conflicting pressures on the process. On the one hand, the existential threat to the state’s survival and the focus on resistance might make fighting corruption and enhancing the rule of law second order issues and thus weaken institutional capacity, elite political will, and society’s focus and reduce the chances of reform implementation. Anticorruption and judicial reform civil society organizations are losing human capital to the war. The inflow of military and financial aid might pour fuel onto the corruption fire and strengthen, rather than weaken incentives to maintain corruption networks. The national security vs. transparency trade-off in an existential war makes it harder to adopt some anticorruption best practices. On the other hand, the existential threat of the war has greatly expanded societal consensus on the desirability of Euroatlantic integration and thus both Ukrainian political elites and society at large have a strong incentive to meet the conditionality criteria. The paper will take stock of the steps taken over the past year and draw lessons about the effectiveness of EU conditionality.

Author

• Maria Popova, McGill University