anticorruption agencies<\/a>, moving to defuse the country\u2019s biggest political crisis since Russia\u2019s invasion in February 2022.<\/p>\nPoliticians on Thursday voted 331 to 0 in favour of the bill, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy submitted last week following pressure from thousands of protesters and top European officials.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy signed the bill into law a couple of hours after it was passed, thanking the MPs \u201cfor passing my bill\u201d via a video message posted to X.<\/p>\n
Ukrainians had reacted angrily to amendments pushed through parliament on July 22 by Zelenskyy\u2019s ruling party that gave the president\u2019s hand-picked general prosecutor the power to transfer cases away from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor\u2019s Office (SAPO) and reassign prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The decision led to some of the biggest protests held in Ukraine since the Russian invasion began, with thousands taking to the streets of Kyiv. Protesters continued to gather even after Zelenskyy had announced that he would roll back the amendments, and were outside parliament on Thursday as legislators voted, bursting into applause after the bill passed.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone is a winner, but first and foremost, democratic Ukraine is the winner,\u201d Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president\u2019s office, wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
Speaking in parliament before the vote, opposition MP Yaroslav Yurchyshyn said that Ukrainians had stopped the government \u201cone step from the abyss\u201d of autocracy.<\/p>\n
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the legislation, writing on X that it was a step towards strengthening the rule of law and aligning with European Union standards.<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera\u2019s Charles Stratford, reporting from outside the parliament building in Kyiv, said that there was a sense of relief among protesters after the \u201clargest political crisis\u201d Zelenskyy has faced since the war began.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last couple of weeks have been a huge embarrassment to President Zelenskyy and his cabinet,\u201d Stratford said. \u201cLots of questions are being asked about \u2026 why he changed the law in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stratford noted that it was not just public anger that had forced Zelenskyy to reverse the decision, but \u201calso a huge amount of pressure from Ukraine\u2019s backers\u201d who were shocked and concerned at the decision, and hints from the EU that some funding to Ukraine may be withdrawn, and that Ukraine was jeopardising its bid for EU membership.<\/p>\n
The initial decision to take away power from the agencies was justified by Zelenskyy because of fears that the bodies had been corrupted by Russia.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if you speak to MPs \u2026 they will tell you that there was concern \u2026 that these investigation bodies were closing in around some individuals within the [government\u2019s] inner circle,\u201d said Stratford, who added that there had been raids targeting members of the anticorruption agencies the night before the initial amendments taking away their power were passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ukraine\u2019s government faced pressure from protesters and foreign backers after attempt to take power from agencies. Ukraine\u2019s parliament…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[2575,299,12,285,332,7661,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-306816","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-corruption","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-russia","13":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","14":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114948385330989794","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}