Canadian Lawyer

January 2018

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 8 17 and officials to settle legal disputes. The Kyiv Post quoted him as saying that bribery would wither if law firms simply stopped being intermediaries in corruption. "Law firms can play a cru- cial process in transformation," argued Stelmashchuk. But there is no evidence that they are doing so. Non-Ukrainian law firms that have been present in the country have not helped. Since 2013, several major for- eign firms — Squire Patton Boggs, Nor- ton Rose Fulbright LLP, Beiten Bur- khardt, Noerr LLP and Clifford Chance LLP — have closed their Ukrainian offices because of so-called "market conditions," including civil unrest, the threat from Russia and the culture of bribery. In a curious and sinister side- bar, New York law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP apparently indirectly received large payments for advice given in 2012 to the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, who later fled the country (he went, guess where, to Russia). Bloomberg News has reported that it was Paul Manafort, the recently federally indicted former cam- paign manager for Donald Trump, who recruited Skadden to give legal advice to Yanukovych. Judges as well as lawyers are active participants in the corrupt system. This past November, the president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, swore in 113 new Supreme Court judges. The Public Integrity Council, a public body created to assess the professional ethics and integrity of judges, vetoed 25 of these new judges and supplied negative information about another 60. Accord- ing to the Kyiv Post, the vetoed judges had "obtained ill-gotten wealth, partici- pated in political cases, made unlawful rulings, or … were under investigation in graft cases." The vetoes and criti- cisms were ignored by the government. Last year, there was a public scandal when a Ukrainian judge was caught in a newspaper photograph wearing a watch worth nearly a third of his annual salary. When I was in Lviv, I went to a lec- ture at Lviv University given by Philippe Sands, an international lawyer who lives in London but has strong family con- nections to Ukraine. Sands' emotional speech was based on his remarkable and complicated 2016 book East West Street. In part, the book tells the story of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin. Lauterpacht originated the idea of "crimes against humanity," put- ting the individual at the heart of the legal order. Lemkin invented the com- peting concept of protecting groups rather than focusing on the individual and coined the word "genocide." And here is a remarkable thing: Lauterpacht and Lemkin were both Ukrainians and attended law school in what was then Lemberg at approximately the same time, in the 1920s. How is it that Lauterpacht and Lem- kin, legal giants who created the mod- ern human rights movement, came from this benighted place? Philip Slayton's latest book, How To Be Good: The Struggle Between Law and Ethics, was published in October. Visit gpllm.law.utoronto.ca Questions? gpllm@utoronto.ca Apply today. ONE YEAR | PART-TIME | FOR LAWYERS AND BUSINESS LEADERS Master the Law. Canada's leading law school offers a graduate degree in four unique streams: Business Law Canadian Law in a Global Context Innovation, Law and Technology Law of Leadership ntitled-6 1 2017-07-12 1:19 PM

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