USC has spent years supporting the rule of law in Ukraine. Will war undo that?

When the University of South Carolina entered into a partnership in 2018 to train Ukrainian legal professionals on promoting the rule of law, it hoped to foster a Western-style legal system in the young democracy.

But four years later, Russia’s full-scale invasion on its smaller neighbor has raised concerns about whether Ukraine will come under the thumb of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“The invasion threatens democracy in Ukraine at a fundamental level,” said Joel Samuels, the dean of USCs College of Arts and Sciences and the executive director of USC’s Rule of Law Collaborative.

The Rule of Law Collaborative operates in several other countries, including Moldova, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, but the Ukraine program is the only one that offers a certificate course for practicing attorneys, judges and other legal officials, Samuels said.

“In a time of crisis; what happens to the rule of law?” Samuels said. “And the answer is, times of crisis are times when the rule of law is most tested and with such a new democracy in Ukraine, the aftermath of the invasion, whatever it looks like will place renewed and new kinds of pressure on the rule of law and it will be more important than ever for us to support Ukraine and its efforts, not only to sustain its democracy, but also to build meaningful mechanisms to protect the rule of law.”

The collaborative’s deputy director, Steve Austermiller, lived in the country of Georgia from 2012 to 2016 after Russia invaded in 2008, and he thinks Putin may be more aggressively anti-democratic this time around. When Russia invaded Georgia, Putin stopped short of sacking the capital of Tbilisi. But long after the brief invasion ended, Russia has failed to turn Georgia into a puppet state, though pro-Russia sentiments in Georgia are reportedly growing.

“He did not topple the government, and so eventually Georgia was able to rebuild its sort of pro-western ways,” Austermiller said. “Maybe the Russians learned a lesson to go all in” on an invasion.

Austermiller agreed the Russian invasion is an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law in Ukraine.

The collaborative is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and is a partnership with Chemonics, a U.S.-based company that seeks to promote human rights, according to a 2018 news release from USC.

While some of the rule of law issues in the United States and in Ukraine overlap — such as pretrial detention reform and voter rights — other issues are specific to Ukraine, Austermiller said.

For example, Ukrainian lawyers and judges are struggling with how to apply the rule of law to citizens who live in Russia-controlled Crimea and have a Ukrainian passport, Austermiller said.

The program, which partners with Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University in Kharkiv, Ukraine is popular among Ukrainian legal scholars, Samuels said. For 30 available spots, the program often sees more than 200 applicants, Samuels said.

Program participants complete a capstone by identifying an issue in Ukraine and proposing a way to fix it, Samuels said.

Support for the rule of law and democratic norms has effects that stretch beyond the ivory tower. The fact that Ukrainians have a meaningful say in their government contributes to the sense of national unity that has been so apparent in the country’s resistance against the Russian military, Austermiller said.

“I think that these kinds of programs, they’ve had an effect maybe in their own small ways, but I really think that the support for the rule of law and the kinds of reforms that Ukraine has made over the last five to 10 years have really made a difference today,” Austermiller said.

“There’s a lot of support for the country, and part of that is because…they’ve seen, I think, that the rule of law is starting to take hold, that corruption is beginning to get rooted out,” Austermiller said of Ukraine. “It’s not perfect…but I think in it’s own way it contributed to this sense of cohesion and nationhood that is now playing out in the battles.”