Daria Kaleniuk: She leads campaign to stop corruption in Ukraine, no matter who tries to block her

Name: Daria Kaleniuk

Age: 29

Education: Law, The Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv

Profession: Executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center

Did you know? Her dream is that she has to close her anti-corruption organization, because Ukraine is free of graft and doesn’t need it anymore.

Daria Kaleniuk believes that corruption always has a name. A real person stands behind every corrupt deal, and this person has to be made responsible for it.

The team of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a non-government organization co-founded by Kaleniuk early in 2013, is not afraid to name such people.

During her student years, Kaleniuk took part in different volunteer and civiс initiatives, such as organizing educational projects for youth, entertainment for children in orphanages and saving Kharkiv’s Bommer, the oldest cinema in Europe, from being sold.

“Whatever I was doing, I saw that the cause for all Ukraine’s problems was corruption,” she told the Kyiv Post.

While studying on the Fulbright Program in the U.S., Kaleniuk researched the international legislative tools to fight corruption. When she was back home, she decided to implement those tools in Ukraine.

She wanted to make the best use of her lawyer’s specialty, but realized that there were no opportunities in Ukraine that she would want to take – it was either big international law company, or a state job, which would make her part of the corrupt system.

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So Kaleniuk, together with Vitaliy Shabunin, whom she knew from the old civic activism times, established their own organization aimed to track and fight corruption.

Their first big project was Yanukovych Info in December 2013, a website with information on all foreign assets of Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who ruled from 2010 until he fled in 2014, and his allies. The data was presented in English, so that European Union countries could freeze all the assets.

After Yanukovych was forced out by the EuroMaidan Revolution, the Anti-Corruption Action Center helped Ukraine’s newly elected parliament to design strong anti-corruption legislation, including the laws on the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, special anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, open property registers and electronic assets declarations.

Kaleniuk said they wanted “the responsibility for corruption to be unavoidable.”

“We want the corrupt officials who use state jobs for embezzlement worth hundreds of millions to end up in jail with their assets confiscated,” she told the Kyiv Post. “Lots has been done already. Now our task is to protect these newly created institutions to give them an opportunity to work at full power.”