Rada Law Enforcement Committee Once Again Pushes Provisions That Endanger Journalists and Whistleblowers

On October 27, the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Law Enforcement returned yet again to the scandalous Draft Law 10242. MPs revisited their earlier decision, stripped out the Criminal Procedure Code amendments that would have repealed the “Lozovyi amendments” and set SAPO’s powers in international legal assistance, and recommended that parliament adopt the document in second reading and as a whole.

We had assessed these now-deleted Criminal Procedure Code amendments as positive in direction, if flawed in substance. They would have scrapped the mandatory closure of proceedings once pretrial investigation deadlines expire and given the SAPO head powers over joint investigation teams and extradition requests. 

All that remains in the document are the provisions that hit journalists and whistleblowers, making the draft law harmful through and through.

What this will mean in practice

A journalist’s source could face up to eight years in prison. Leaking data from closed state registers under martial law will be punishable by up to eight years’ imprisonment (Article 361-2 of the Criminal Code). The article covers cybercrimes such as copying information on notarial acts, inheritance, foreign passports, border crossings, or CCTV footage. The proposed amendments to the article contain no exemptions whatsoever for journalists or for whistleblowers disclosing information of public necessity. 

Journalists risk their freedom for publishing their own work. Posting an investigation on a website or YouTube could fall under the ban on disseminating restricted information. Unlike whistleblowers under the Law on Corruption Prevention, journalists enjoy no special protection, which leaves them exposed to criminal prosecution for professional work that serves the public interest.

Both the journalist and their source face covert surveillance. An investigator need only assume that the specific data points shown in an investigation are part of a larger copied dataset. From there, proceedings can be opened under the amended Article 362 and used as grounds for covert investigative (search) actions. Thus, the protection of sources is nullified.

A chilling effect on the fight against corruption. Newsrooms may hold back investigative reports, and potential whistleblowers and sources will stay silent about abuses. The number and quality of media exposés, and in turn of individual anti-corruption investigations, will decline, while the true scale of corruption stays hidden from the public. Far fewer media reports will expose corruption, leaving the corrupt free to keep running criminal schemes.

The draft law also fails to solve the very problem it was supposedly designed to fix: unscrupulous officials trading data from registers. Read our detailed analysis of the draft law as it stood before today’s committee meeting on our website.

TI Ukraine calls for Draft Law 10242 to be rejected, as it does nothing but harm the fight against corruption and obstructs access to information of public importance.