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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms 
of the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0

1 Zaporizhzhia National University, Ukraine
E-mail: t_deputy@ukr.net
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1101-8073
2 Zaporizhzhia National University, Ukraine (corresponding author)
E-mail: almak17@ukr.net
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0042-165X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30525/2256-0742/2023-9-5-119-129

EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF TRANSFORMATION  
OF ANTI-CORRUPTION LEGAL REQUIREMENTS IN THE 

CONTEXT OF UKRAINE'S EUROPEAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION
Tatiana Kolomoiets1, Oleksii Makarenkov2

Abstract. The article reveals the epistemological context of transformations of anti-corruption legal  
requirements in the conditions of European economic integration of Ukraine. It has been established that 
the elimination of the dominance of human defects by the tools of legislation and law enforcement practices  
becomes effective when the reproducible knowledge reflects the scientific awareness. The subject of knowledge 
is the whole complex of issues of fostering the manifestation of good virtues and their suppression. Otherwise, 
both economic reproduction and economic progress are excluded. For Ukraine, both processes now depend  
on an understanding of the respective progressive solutions that the highly developed nations of the EU have to  
offer. In fact, integration into the EU is historically determined and currently historically inevitable, and therefore 
requires meaningful dynamic transformations of domestic legislation. The most urgent direction of these 
transformations requires interdisciplinary knowledge related to the fight against corruption and its minimisation.
It has been established that the epistemological context of the creation and application of anti-corruption legal  
norms consists of scientifically proven, comprehensive knowledge about the mechanism of neutralisation of 
corruption by means of coercion and stimulation. The methodology of gaining knowledge through human 
consciousness involves the use of logical resources, namely 1) rational conclusions of formal logic; 2) contradictions 
and patterns of dialectical logic; 3) actions and events of historical logic; 4) artefacts of art logic. The truth 
of knowledge, verified by these means of reasoning and empirical experience, is then partly expressed by  
mathematical and linguistic symbols, and the rest is conveyed in an intuitive way. The understanding of 
that which does not fit into the forms of words and numbers is done mentally and sensitively. At this point, it 
should be emphasised that the praxeological dimension of pure epistemology requires taking into account  
the characteristics of the cognitive subjects of a specific social community. This requirement extends the  
scientist's sphere of responsibility beyond epistemology and involves mastering knowledge of its historical 
determinants. It is concluded that the teleological attitudes of the Ukrainian nation include the study of the  
values of European nations, which have united for the purpose of economic well-being. Integration into the  
EU requires knowledge of the mechanisms for combating human vices, eliminating corrupt distortions and  
using human virtues in EU structures. Regional civilisational stratification persists due to both intra-national 
and international dishonesty. Accordingly, global integration based on fundamentally unified legal standards  
requires the elimination of counterproductive factors at both levels of social communication. The focus of  
attention on good virtues is determined differently from the existing configuration of national associations. 
Economic and other issues of cultural heritage are first a consequence and then a cause of the manifestation 
of good virtues. At the same time, military alliances confirm the deep ideological contradictions of nations.  
This shows the denial of the possibility of creating a global union of nations based on the manifestation in  
legal reality of the good virtues of its members. It is on the basis of the legal manifestation of the degree of  
virtue that nations and their associations are formed in the modern world.

Key words: integrity, economy, European Union, epistemology, legislation, corruption, legal culture, legal values, 
offenses, court.

JEL Classification: D73, K40



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1. Introduction
Culture and the material objects that express it are 

organised around an economy of exchange between 
preservation and destruction. The transience of 
all material media that humans desire and develop 
into cultural forms for representing, recording and 
communicating experiences with one another, works 
to extend communication beyond the temporal 
and physical limits of the life of the human body 
(Stapleton, 2022). Such anti-corruption intentions 
and expectations, which are not based on scientifically 
proven, comprehensive knowledge of the mechanism 
of corruption neutralisation, and which are not 
materialised in cultural artefacts in the form of 
legislative and judicial acts, become illusory. Language 
in such contexts means a tendency inherent in the 
relevant subjects, technology, art, law or religion, to 
transfer content to the mind. Every expression of  
human mental life can be understood as a kind of 
language, and this understanding, in the manner of 
a true method, raises new questions everywhere.  
It is possible to speak of a language of music and 
sculpture, of a language of justice. All communication 
of the contents of the mind is language. Words are  
only a special case of human language and of  
justice, poetry, or whatever underlies it or is based on it 
(Walter, 1996).

Incorruptibly true to itself, it penetrates infinitely 
deeper into the facts of matter than sentimental 
ratiocination. The material content itself, which  
yields only to philosophical perception, or more 
precisely to philosophical experience, remains 
inaccessible to both, but whereas the latter leads 
to the abyss, the former reaches the very ground  
where true knowledge is formed (Walter, 1996).  
The key to understanding this hypothesis lies in  
the details of both the subject of knowledge,  
integrity and its significance for law and economics, 
and their characteristics. Dishonest distortions of 
legal relations and knowledge of them are changeable, 
often not obvious. The more complex the content 
and structure of a person's consciousness, the more 
sophisticated their content and form. They are  
distorted in the minds of legal subjects, such as  
those who commit corrupt acts, and often also in 
the minds of citizens who make a legal assessment 
of these acts. The consciousness of society and its  
groups (ethnic, religious, labour, etc.) is superimposed 
on the interrelations of all these components. The 
overarching or higher order ontological categories 
characteristic of cognitive science are: individuals  
(or objects), states, processes, and capacities (Khalidi, 
2023). In addition, a collective intention provides 
participants with a collective reason for action that 
may or may not overlap with their personal intentions  
(Rota, 2023).

Nations and peoples are a special legal pheno- 
menon, a meta-legal subject. They are not direct 
participants in legal relations, they pursue their 
interests through other persons. They are spiritual and 
legal communities of people, which fundamentally 
distinguishes them from any legal entities, which 
are the result of legal communication and human 
interaction, and is expressed in the achieved unity of 
legal consciousness. They are the basis of the integrity 
of legal systems, form a single "legal field", are the 
bearers of sovereignty, a source of public power, etc. 
(Makarenko, 2019). When there is less corruption, 
there is more innovation (Aghion, Antonin, Bunel, 
2021). A social community with a high level of 
spiritual development (e.g., German, Portuguese, 
English, Japanese, Singaporean, Dutch, Scandinavian) 
can be expected to have an inertial positive influence  
on every member of society, and vice versa. Even 
if a person is not interested in the requirements of  
anti-corruption legislation, a society with such a level  
of civilisation will certainly provide him with 
information about proper legal practices, examples  
of lawful behaviour and other cultural artefacts of  
social progress. This person has no other way out  
than to perceive all this in a minimally sufficient  
volume. The function of violence in lawmaking is 
twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as 
its end, with violence as its means, what is to be  
established as law, but at the moment of instituting  
it it does not reject violence; rather, at this very  
moment of lawmaking it specifically establishes 
as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one 
necessarily and intimately bound up with it, under  
the title of power. Law-making is the exercise of 
power, the assumption of power, and in this respect 
an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is 
the principle of all divine law-making, power is the  
principle of all mythical law-making (Walter, 1996).

2. Analysis of Recent Thematic Resources
The issue of legal epistemology, the transformation 

of the requirements of the anti-corruption law and  
the conditions of the European economic integration  
of Ukraine in a variety of relationships are revealed 
in legal, philosophical and economic doctrines. 
O. O. Bandura revealed the dialectical relations of 
legal epistemology as a component of legal philosophy 
with legal ontology, anthropology, praxeology and 
axiology, 2018; M. V. Banchuk – ideology and  
culture of human rights defenders' activity in 
thesystem of civil society, 2004; S. V. Bobrovnyk –  
an anthropological-communicative approach to the 
analysis of compromise and conflict in law, 2011; 
V. M. Vartsaba – tactical and psychological bases of the 
investigation of crimes of organised criminal groups, 
2003; K. V. Horobets – axiosphere of law, 2012; 



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M. V. Danshin – classification of concealed crimes 
in criminological methods, 2000; O. I. Dergunova –  
theoretical bases of the genesis and transformations  
of the psychological type of legal understanding, 
2020; E. P. Yevgrafova – theoretical-applied principles 
of legal objectivity, 2016; O. A. Ivakin – problems of 
dialectical philosophy, 2003; Yu. Yu. Kalinovsky –  
legal consciousness of the Ukrainian society, 2010; 
Yu. V. Melyakova – subject-object relations, forms, 
levels, methods of cognition, types of truths and 
other elements of the paradigmatic structure of legal 
epistemology, 2015; M. P. Orzih – personality and 
law, 2005; I. V. Paterilo – law as a value category,  
2009; T. T. Polyansky – abuse of law, 2013; 
O. E. Prots – legal culture of youth in Ukraine, 2013;  
S. M. Skurikhin – status and competent legal  
culture of servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, 
2011; V. M. Trepak – investigation of bribery of 
judges and overcoming countermeasures by means 
of operational and investigative activities, 2011; 
V. I. Tsarenko – formation of legal awareness of the 
military border guards personality of Ukraine, 2003; 
A. V. Shilo – use in criminal proceedings of information 
obtained as a result of secret investigative (research) 
actions; N. Walker, K. Holtfreter – application of 
criminological theory to academic fraud; and others. 
At the same time, the epistemological context of the 
anti-corruption law's transformation in the conditions 
of Ukraine's European economic integration has not 
been sufficiently explored. In this regard, questions 
remain about the relationship between the object 
of knowledge and its subject in the creation and 
application of legal norms, which are designed to 
minimise the manifestation of human defects, to  
ensure the strengthening of the good human virtues 
tendency dominance in the course of legal relations, 
in particular, for the purpose of forming the capacity 
of Ukrainian nation integration into the desired type 
of material and spiritual values reproduction, which 
is characteristic of the EU countries. Therefore, the 
purpose of the article is to reveal the epistemological 
context of anti-corruption legal requirements in the 
conditions of European economic integration of 
Ukraine.

3. Epistemological Analysis of Legal  
Grounds for the Unification of Nations

Despite the integrative processes taking place in  
the modern world, the development of cultures 
and separate areas of culture is connected with 
the preservation of the qualitative certainty of 
each of them. From these positions, national legal 
cultures continue to act as carriers of traditions and  
innovations in law, ensuring the preservation of  
their uniqueness and separateness in interaction with 
the legal cultures of other states, regional legal cultures, 

as well as the legal culture of the world order. The 
unification of legislation and other components of 
the social system of Ukraine with the corresponding 
components of the social system of the nations 
belonging to the European Union is a dynamic 
process of interaction and mutual influence of  
national legal cultures, which requires guidance in  
order to preserve the ability of the national legal  
culture to be an expression of those unique features  
of the legal mentality of the Ukrainian nation, which 
determine its viability – reproduction and maximum 
possible progress (Stanyk, 1999). Otherwise, 
the achievement of goals will weaken the nation 
(Makarenko, 2019). Viability is a criterion for  
assessing the expediency of preserving the  
characteristics of a nation. If the feature and/or the 
value of a nation, the combination of such features  
in a specific civilisational context and its dynamics  
do not allow it to reproduce and develop culture,  
then the nation must transform itself, namely:  
a) abandon the value and/or not rely on the feature, 
their combinations for a period of time as long as  
they do not allow it to progress; b) revive and use  
them when they provide progress as a result of the 
changes that have taken place in the civilisational 
context. This kind of transformation will mean both 
the independent creation of new features and values 
of the national mentality, and their borrowing from 
those nations that express the legal mechanism of 
development in specific historical periods.

External linkages of social communities update 
the concepts of regional and global influence on 
their integrity and, accordingly, knowledge about it. 
Differences in national, ethnic, class and caste ethical 
and legal norms draw attention to differences in the 
ethical and legal evaluations of the representatives 
of these social communities. Provided that there is 
an internal social consensus on the main legal issues,  
there is reason to talk about the possibility of  
unifying such a legal order with similar structures of 
legal organisation of other societies. Provided that 
there is an internal social consensus on the main  
legal issues, there is reason to talk about the possibility 
of unifying the legal order with similar structures in 
other societies. A civilisational equalisation between 
social communities involves the elimination of 
significantly different assessments of good virtues  
and their corresponding legal norms. The one who 
already acts well achieves the highest good.

Key questions about the human good concern  
access to basic resources for survival and reproduction 
in contemporary civilisations. Life always carries 
a hint of corruption to indicate that it is composed  
of dead matter (Walter, 1996). Corrupt nations  
restrict this access to such an extent that they 
simultaneously show demographic and technological 
decline, as well as a significant decline in artistic 



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and scientific potential. In "corrupt" countries, the 
relationship between the tax burden and growth 
is negative, while in "democratic" countries it 
is significantly positive. The more corrupt the  
government, the lower the threshold at which  
taxation starts to have a negative impact on growth. 
Taxation is therefore an indispensable tool for 
stimulating growth and making it more inclusive.  
It enables the state to invest in growth levers such  
as education, health and research, and because it  
enables the state to redistribute wealth and insure 
individuals against idiosyncratic risks (job loss,  
illness, obsolescence of skills) and macroeconomic  
risks (war, financial crises, etc.). However, this 
instrument must be used with caution: its short-term 
effects on social mobility are not proven, excessive 
taxation can discourage innovation and thus growth, 
and so forth (Aghion, Antonin, Bunel, 2021).  
Countries with a tendency to corruptly distort the  
law consume not for the sake of progress, but against it. 

An important consequence of this interaction  
between the level of development and the impact 
of competition on a country's growth is corruption. 
The more corruption there is, the greater the ability 
of incumbent firms to pressure politicians to reduce 
competition and prevent new firms from entering the 
market. Corruption is expected to be more of a drag 
on growth in advanced countries (Aghion, Antonin, 
Bunel, 2021). The association of such nations with  
their counterparts is not something unequal, but 
entirely artificial according to the parameter of legal 
integrity. Formally, such associations are possible,  
but they become a legal reality when they actually 
regulate legal relations based on the good virtues of 
all. Human faults, arrogance, whims, evil deeds and 
immoral offences should constitute a small part, up 
to 10%, of legal relations. Otherwise, the declaration  
of unity based on the principle of the rule of law  
will not become a fact that strengthens the Union.  
The logic of the history of civilisation convinces  
that the scale of these unions, even at regional level, 
is a long-term and labour-intensive matter. Both 
parameters imply the need to ensure the succession 
of generations. The results of the achievements must 
be perceived by the successors at the appropriate 
level of spiritual vibrations of knowledge about the  
mechanisms of permanent legal assurance dominance 
of integrity.

The concept of legal acculturation, dialogue 
of legal cultures, dynamics of legal cultures  
(A. F. Kryzhanivskyi, M. V. Tsvik) contributes to 
the search for acceptable solutions for the successful 
international unification of mechanisms ensuring 
the dominance of human virtues in legal relations.  
Its content touches upon the interaction and mutual 
influence of national legal cultures at the level of  
public authority, private legal relations, science, 

legislation, as well as the stability, positive and  
negative nature of the interaction of national legal 
cultures, the strength of their identity, the ability 
to assimilate innovations without deforming one's  
own legal values (Stanyk, 1999). At the global level,  
the legal intentions of regional associations of states  
have not yet been realised. The reasons for this are  
that the focus of the public authorities of each  
country during integration is not on the fundamental 
legal concept of integrity and the rule of law, but on 
applied issues of military security, economic potential, 
etc. Another factor of disintegration is the actual 
unpreparedness of some nations to civilisationally 
progressive legal and ethical standards of other  
nations. The solution to the third issue of regional 
and global integration of people on the basis of good 
virtues lies in the ability of social associations to  
use the strengths inherent in each nation (ethnic 
group) that is part of such an association. The proof 
of this ability to unite nations lies in the fact that  
each individual nation is able to identify the  
productive qualities of each of its members and  
use them effectively. Otherwise, there is no  
international analogue of mutual nourishment 
with the energy of good virtues. The fourth factor 
in the natural global disintegration of nations is  
transnational corruption. Some nations have 
a consumerist attitude towards others. The social  
justice of technologically advanced nations is to 
some extent ensured by the exploitation of other 
nations, the social injustice of such less developed 
nations. Globalisation can work in a world of 
converging values and effective conflict management. 
Governance – the processes and rules that govern 
an organisation – is central to manifesting the  
integration of profit and purpose. This includes  
creative practices that manifest and bring to life 
core values. For example, a key challenge for the 
international community will be to ensure that, in 
the future, the practices and values of international  
criminal justice become the basis for evidence- 
gathering that successfully informs systematic 
prosecutions in courts and tribunals that respect 
due process and its ontology of human virtues  
(The Future of Global Affairs).

The above-mentioned reasons for the lack of global 
consensus and sincerity regarding the possibilities 
of legal enforcement of the dominance of human 
virtues in legal relations determine at least the 
trends of population migration, refugees and other 
global problems. All other things being equal (lat. 
'ceteris paribus'), a person migrates to the social 
environment that is closest to him in terms of spiritual 
development: culture, lifestyle, traditions, methods of  
communication, and so forth. Legal traditions are 
produced directly by the participants in legal relations, 
thanks to the experience of the people. Legal heritage 



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is created by scholars (legal doctrine), ideologists  
(state ideology) and people (participants in legal 
relations). Both legal heritage and legal tradition  
perform the function of transmission. These  
phenomena of legal reality move from the past to the 
present and are preserved in the socio-legal memory. 
The preservation and use of elements of the previous 
legal system is carried out both as a result of a critical 
rethinking of the legal heritage and as a result of the 
objective impossibility of abandoning that part of it 
which constitutes legal traditions (Kobko-Odarii, 
2021). The practice of EU enlargement has shown 
that the adaptation of the national legislation of the 
associated countries to the legal reality of the EU 
must be balanced and have the character of both  
hard and soft legal obligations of the parties,  
depending on the spheres in which harmonisation 
is carried out, taking into account the specificity 
of relations with a particular country. In order to 
ensure the flexibility of the processes of adaptation 
of the worldview of a broad part of the population of  
Ukraine to the perception of the content of  
universal legal values of the EU, legal and cultural 
communication between Ukraine and the EU at 
all levels should be filled with practical content  
(Petryshyn, Kaganovska, Perederii, 2022).

4. Integrity Challenges  
in Ukraine's Integration into the EU

The community of human beings is based on their 
virtues. The saturation of these virtues is directly 
proportional to the ability of the people united  
on this basis to reproduce the level of material 
and spiritual values. For instance, if the Italian, 
Spanish, Portuguese and Ukrainian nations have 
a heightened aesthetic sense, other nations that lack 
it use these nations' abilities to invent original design  
solutions. The alternative ways of seeing include 
a distinct bodily and sensory dimension, which can  
blur the line between a representation and what it 
represents, inviting one to understand certain images 
as the embodiment of a spiritual presence, without 
reducing them to mere symbols of something else 
(Rota, 2023).

The state accumulates the energy and will of the 
nation (Makarenko, 2019). Its dysfunction is the  
result of ignoring the significance of the peculiarities  
of the national mentality. For the nation this means 
a shift towards the dominance of human defects that 
distort the nature of law in legislation, administrative 
and judicial acts of its application. The extent and 
duration of such distortions, which are classified 
as corruption violations in the field of public-legal 
relations, cause wars, famines, genocides and other 
acute social crises, excluding opportunities for the 
progress of all humanity. The complexity of the 

current situation in Ukraine is manifested in the  
lack of economic growth, the decline in the standard 
of living of the majority of the population, the 
strengthening of corruption in the power structures, 
the decline in the level of social morality, the  
stagnation in the development of national culture 
(Makarenko, 2019). The extermination of the 
intellectually developed population of Ukraine by the 
communists in the years 1917–1991 meant the loss  
of the Ukrainian nation's ability after 1991 to  
reproduce its economic (demographic, technological, 
spiritual-cultural) potential, to neutralise corrupt 
distortions, theft of national wealth by individuals,  
etc. Ukrainian lawyers, analysing the current state 
of the national legislative system, point out that its  
typical feature today is imbalance, contradiction, 
material imperfection, corruption, and so forth 
(Popadynets, 2020). Since 1991, the economy and 
politics, and often the judiciary, in Ukraine have been 
run by people who have failed to prevent critical  
threats to national security, who have enabled the  
theft of national wealth, the dominance of bribery, 
nepotism and other forms of corruption, profound 
inequality for the majority of the population, its  
cultural decline and other social injustices.

By way of illustration, it can be said that the  
majority of enterprises were run by people not by 
vocation but by corrupt distortion and/or violence.  
As a result, the work of these enterprises became 
inefficient, wages were unreasonably low, and the 
enterprises gradually went bankrupt and/or became 
a burden on the social system. The standard schemes  
of inefficiency have become the following criminal 
acts: a) borrowing from banks for unprofitable  
projects and not repaying these loans; b) using  
company funds for one's own purposes; c) a cycle  
of organised bankruptcies of the same company,  
changing only the name, but leaving the production 
facilities and personnel. The construction of ‘homo 
economicus’, the rational being par excellence, turned 
out to be a failed attempt to construct an ahistorical 
and transcendent subject endowed with a universal  
and instrumental rationality applicable at any time  
and to any social activity (Herscovici, 2023).

The result for such authorities and entrepreneurs  
was economic decline and the loss of the ability to 
effectively prevent military aggression from outside. 
In this context, the words of Justice William Douglas 
ring true: "Absolute discretion, like corruption, marks 
the beginning of the end of liberty." (Powderly, 2020) 
For example, the ability to reproduce and process 
milk and meat raw materials, and to make food 
products from them, has been significantly weakened. 
Other examples, namely: a) since 2008, Ukraine has 
stopped the production of artificial respirators, which 
will be urgently needed from the end of 2019 to the 
beginning of 2020, when the lung damage of millions 



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of Ukrainians will spread as a result of exposure to 
the COVID-19 virus; b) since 1995, a single plant 
in Ukraine, which has a full cycle of car production, 
has not been able to eliminate technological  
backwardness and restore competitiveness due 
to corruption. The managerial and technological 
solutions proposed for this purpose by foreign 
companies – Peugeot, Fiat, General Motors  
(especially Adam Opel GmbH and others), 
Daewoo – were mostly rejected. The destructive 
influence of corruption on the organisational skills 
of officials and entrepreneurs has prevented the 
implementation of projects in the rocket, aircraft,  
ship, tank, automobile and other science-intensive 
industries. The tendency of the domestic management 
system to depend on the virtues of other nations  
has continued to this day. At the same time, it is 
growing exponentially, covering more and more  
areas of governance and regulation that require  
advanced solutions that are already available in other 
countries. States form anti-corruption associations 
based on the criteria of judicial, managerial and 
expert control over the spread of corruption, which 
demonstrates spiritual poverty and economic failure. 
Ukraine has ratified international anti-corruption 
treaties with the United Nations Office on Drugs and 
Crime; the UN Human Rights Council in the person 
of the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of 
Judges and Lawyers, the Group of States against 
Corruption, the Committee of Experts of the 
Council of Europe on the Evaluation of Anti-Money  
Laundering Measures, the Organisation for Economic 
Cooperation and Development, Eurojust, Europol,  
the European Partners against Corruption,  
the European Anti-Fraud Office, the International 
Money Laundering Group, the Organisation for 
Security and Cooperation in Europe, Interpol, 
the World Bank and the European Bank for  
Reconstruction and Development.

Empirical material on the causes of the dysfunction  
of public governance and private management of 
material production in various spheres enables the 
formulation of legal solutions that eliminate the 
determinants of this dysfunction, namely: corruption 
distortions and their numerous bifurcations in the 
form of organised crime. New concepts, lists of 
characteristics, grounds and other components of  
legal formulas should cover corruption practices 
regularly reproduced in social relations, recognising 
them as torts, as well as properly describing the 
judicial procedures for bringing disciplinary, 
administrative and criminal responsibility for 
corruption offences. For example, in the investigation 
of bribery offences, the bribe-taker is interested  
in the fact that in his/her criminal activity he/she  
uses his/her official position, causing significant  
damage to the prestige of the state whose functions  

are entrusted to this person. The personality of 
a bribe-taker has several features that characterise it 
from different perspectives: a) in terms of the correct 
exercise of its public authority; b) attitude to it (free,  
not oriented towards legal prescriptions, allowing 
violations bordering on abuse or crime; with fear of 
responsibility, loss of position; within the framework 
and limits established by law and professional 
functions); c) from the point of view of moral  
principles; d) the character of the person; e) a tendency 
to various kinds of abuse, links with criminal groups, 
and so forth (Mishkov, 2005).

5. Awareness of Legal Dysfunctions  
of Anti-Corruption Legislation

The effect of punishing corruption requires a change 
in the behaviour of the vast majority of public  
officials from a cynical contempt for law and morality 
to respect for these values, as well as for justice and 
equality in their dealings with other citizens. It is 
important to eliminate corruption and administrative 
pressure on judges as the greatest obstacle to  
a domestic judiciary based on the rule of law,  
thereby guaranteeing the protection of the interests  
of economic entities on which the economic  
well-being of all depends. It is the duty of the judge 
to receive any offer of evidence which may be made 
to him, even though the parties themselves, through 
negligence, ignorance or corrupt collusion, should  
not have made it. A judge is not placed in this high 
position merely as a passive instrument of the parties. 
He has a duty of his own, independent of them, and  
that duty is to ascertain the truth. One of the primary 
tasks of the judicial function is to render a judgement 
based on the interpretation of the rules applicable to 
the facts of the case, and to do so expeditiously and in 
accordance with procedural fairness (Powderly, 2020).

The transparency of relations between state  
authorities and non-governmental organisations  
should be created by increasing public confidence 
in state authorities as a result of reducing the risks 
of corruption, effective use of funds, state financial  
support of non-governmental organisations,  
enshrining in national legislation European principles 
and standards of interaction of state authorities with 
non-governmental organisations, ensuring unification 
and standardisation of rules and procedures of  
relations between authorities and citizens  
(Popadynets, 2020). The demonstration of good  
virtues by one's own example should be a standard  
in the work team, supported by colleagues and 
accompanied by thematic, educational and cultural 
events. All these measures require the establishment 
of a fair economic basis. Money is a store of value  
and the standard by which debts and other legal 
obligations, habits, opinions, conventions, in short, 



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all kinds of relationships between people, are more  
or less rigidly fixed. As for individual freedom, it  
must be limited in such a way as to ensure the  
conditions for the reproduction of this collectivity. 
Adam Smith, for example, recognises the need to 
maintain the general conditions that allow for the 
reproduction of capitalist society: legitimation and 
respect for private property based on the creation 
of legal and state structures. Economic freedom can 
be effective only when these general conditions are  
realised (Herscovici, 2023). If the distribution of  
wealth is based on the results of labour activity, 
contrary to the quality of human abilities, on  
artificial, contrived grounds, the authority of good 
virtues, educational programmes on the value of 
integrity and other progressive ideas will not be 
sustainable and long-lasting.

The course of social relations based on the rule  
of law and the human traits relevant to it is  
determined, among other things, by the behaviour 
of political subjects who receive a mandate from  
the people to solve national and local public  
problems. Any distortion of the established values  
of law and morality by anyone from the parliament  
and local councils significantly weakens the anti-
corruption policy. If such violations are large-scale, 
massive, then there is no reason at all to talk about 
success in eliminating corruption distortions. Theft 
of public property and other disregard for public  
interests by the public administration, including  
the government and the executive committee of the 
local council, as well as representatives of justice  
such as judges, prosecutors, investigators, and police, 
and numerous inspectors of various services, such  
as personnel, disciplinary commissions, customs, 
border, fish protection, forest protection,  
antimonopoly, and financial, form a nihilistic  
attitude towards the law and good human virtues.  
The despondency of citizens generated and fuelled  
by such content cannot be overcome by the 
amount or content of scientific knowledge on anti- 
corruption. The limit of the effect of legal knowledge 
in the field of anti-corruption is set by corruption 
offences committed by officials of public authorities. 
Their mistakes limit the development of everyone. 
The pursuit of private interests in the exercise of  
public authority narrows positive prospects for  
society. In fact, these prospects are closed and, 
accordingly, the demand for legal knowledge, 
which by definition concerns the public interest, is  
excluded. In this situation, the scientist and the 
knowledge he produces appear illusory. The social  
reality of the corrupt mechanism of building 
relationships, where corrupt distortions exclude 
the legal essence of these relationships, becomes 
more understandable and expected. Instead, people  
saturate their interactions with each other with  

violence, injustice, human suffering, existential 
degradation and other consequences of the  
symptoms of the perversion of human consciousness. 
The decay of justice in state institutions is a cyclical  
and inevitable regression from a point of origin  
in the violent establishment of law. Whether one 
subscribes to natural law or positive law, where  
"natural law... regards violence as a natural datum" 
and "positive law... regards violence as a product of  
history", violence is an unavoidable part of both 
the establishment and the maintenance of law,  
legitimised by the abstract assumption of justice  
(Walter, 1996; Stapleton, 2022).

6. Correlation of Corruption  
with Legal Institutions to Address It

The interdisciplinary nature of the subject of anti-
corruption knowledge makes it very difficult to grasp 
and implement in practice. There are so many links  
and relationships in the legal mechanism that it is  
easy to violate its logic and/or distort its meaning 
in practice. When such links are violated massively,  
for a long time, in the face of weak resistance from  
the population and/or with the conspiracy of  
criminals, then corruption dominates and it is too 
difficult to deal with it using the classic tools of 
administrative and criminal law. Their criminal norms 
become inadequate. It is possible to counteract 
corrupt distortions and thus ensure openness to legal 
opportunities on the basis of properly structured 
and sufficiently meaningful scientific knowledge, as 
well as on the condition that it is updated in time  
and consistently implemented in social reality. 
Otherwise, this kind of knowledge is impossible,  
because an exceptionally deeply corrupt society  
does not become a suitable environment for  
collecting empirical data sufficient for proper  
verification of scientific hypotheses and conclusions 
truth. This relationship determines the need for  
each nation to compare itself with each other  
according to the criterion of the presence of  
corruption in real life. It is like daily gymnastics 
for the physical body of a person. The human  
community needs a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly  
and long-term check of the conformity of its 
communication practices with the nature of the 
law embodied in human virtues. According to the 
results of such a comparison, the more corrupt  
nation necessarily needs the help of the less corrupt 
nation and its associations. This is assistance in the  
form of knowledge transfer about more virtuous 
practices in public administration, the judiciary,  
political communication, the drafting of legal norms,  
etc. For example, the academic mobility project 
"Enhancing legal research capacity and excellence" 
under the UKRI Twinning Programme (Dr Hannah 



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Bows J., Durham University; 2-23 July 2023). 
The comparative legal method of implementing 
transnational anti-corruption policy also involves  
taking into account the specifics of national features 
of legal relationship building and the appropriate 
adaptation of such borrowed knowledge.

The above-mentioned transfer of knowledge is 
illustrated by the experience of relatively corruption-
free countries. As an example, if in the Federal  
Republic of Germany the freedom to express one's  
will and severe, unavoidable punishments for offences 
are the basic principles of the legal system, then in 
Ukraine this freedom is significantly corrected by 
coercion, violence (of the family, the work team, the 
authorities), and the judicial procedures and practices 
of their application are so corrupt and vulnerable that 
punishment can be avoided. If in Singapore there 
is a public consensus on the issue of high financial 
support for civil servants, in Ukraine there is no 
such consensus. On the contrary, there is a growing 
tendency towards legal infantilism in the sense of 
overestimating the ability to work effectively with  
the funds allocated for this purpose, especially at the 
local level, as well as distrust of public authorities. 
Equally simplistic in corrupt societies is the 
condescending attitude towards the incompetence 
of public authorities, the tolerance of their  
unreasonably large material support, especially for 
members of parliament, judges and law enforcement 
officers. The social mission of each level of public  
power makes each of its representatives responsible 
for the actions of all his colleagues. At the same time, 
there is no correlation between the commission 
of a corruption offence by a public official and the 
corresponding reduction in funding for members of 
his working team who occupy equivalent positions 
and/or have a similar legal status. In other words, the 
commission of a corruption offence by a Member of 
Parliament should lead to a proportional reduction 
in the funding of other Members of the institution.  
This calculation is based on the total amount of  
bribes and unlawful enrichment established in court 
decisions on the guilt of the respective representatives 
of public power structures. 

The experience of Canada, New Zealand, the 
AUKUS countries and the EU in defining the spheres 
of responsibility of each public official by means of 
sufficiently detailed professional instructions is useful 
for dynamic integration into the standards of a high 
legal culture. For Ukraine, this means, firstly, the need  
to carry out the full range of legal work on the 
development and implementation of such  
instructions. And secondly, to reflect in these 
instructions cases of manifestations of a good  
initiative of a public servant aimed at achieving 
legitimate goals and/or ensuring their achievement, 
although such action formally contradicts the  

provisions of legal requirements. It is quite possible  
to implement this recommendation within the limits 
of detailing the praxeological dimension of the rule of 
law principle for each area of public administration.  
The success of the implementation of this anti- 
corruption measure correlates with the material 
motivation of the public official. The impulse to 
cleanliness is sometimes divorced from the desire 
for justice. It then loses itself in minutiae, only to 
reappear like a phantom, exaggerated in large-scale 
events as a mixture in which purity and impurity 
are indistinguishable. There can be no metaphysical  
purity that is ultimately permanent without a  
struggle to perceive the highest and most extreme 
laws governing the world (Walter, 1996). The  
emergence of social order, or "civilisation", is also 
the development of the political will to impose  
prohibitions on the bodies and behaviours of those 
who live within it. This imposition is largely achieved 
through the expression of laws in the semiotic  
systems of visual cultures (Stapleton, 2022). 
The epistemological demand for transparency of  
legislative, administrative and judicial decisions of 
public authorities is considered within the framework 
of theories of open civil society; legal, social 
state; electronic governance and justice; as well as  
information security against the background of global 
military, food, financial and other challenges, anti-
terrorist policy as a component of national security, etc.

Scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines are 
related in complex ways, in particular through "inter-
field theories" that do not imply a direct or indirect 
reduction between them. On the one hand, it would 
be possible to go beyond the categories currently 
used to explain and predict people's actions and  
utterances and largely replace them with a new  
cognitive vocabulary. On the other hand, theoretical 
advances are often made by introducing new  
categories alongside current ones, or by splitting 
current categories into subcategories while retaining 
the original categories (Khalidi, 2023). Definition 
of values, terms, concepts and other theoretical  
constructs of law, accompanied by comprehensive, 
exhaustive explanations of the ways of structuring 
thought processes and their results, constitute the  
initial basis for transformations in anti-corruption 
creation and application of tort, incentive and other 
legal norms. Hypotheses and sanctions of corruption 
offences subject to labour, service, administrative 
and criminal law. Their disclosure requires, inter alia, 
thorough criminological knowledge. Lawyers conduct 
legal research and perform various legal tasks on  
a daily basis (Echaore-McDavid, 2007). 

For excessively corrupt countries (where the  
measure is the loss of national wealth and the 
halting of progress), even the correct definition of  
corruption offences in accordance with available 



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domestic and foreign academic doctrine becomes 
impossible. In other words, favouritism, nepotism  
and familism in the public service are not recognised  
as separate offences in national anti-corruption 
legislation, but have become part of legal abstractions 
within the framework of institutions for combating 
discrimination in the workplace and in other areas 
of the distribution of material benefits, conflicts of  
interest, co-working and the combination of jobs/
positions. The second weakness of the criminal 
dimension of anti-corruption legislation is procedural. 
This makes every stage of the anti-corruption  
judicial process susceptible to corruption influence –  
from the moment the materials of the corruption  
case are prepared until the court makes its final  
decision on the case. Compliance with procedural 
deadlines, the accuracy and completeness of the  
content of procedural documents, the sufficiency 
of evidence of a corrupt act can be weakened by 
biased assessments of unscrupulous law enforcement 
officers, prosecutors and judges. In this case,  
excellent knowledge of forensic methods and tactics 
of criminal corruption and/or related organised 
crime investigation, professional application of  
covert investigative actions, i.e., the practical side 
of investigative actions within the criminal process, 
is also required. At the same time, knowledge of  
typical techniques and operations of preparation, 
execution and concealment of crimes, characteristic 
traces of illegal actions, personal characteristics 
of criminals and other elements of the criminal  
mechanism is an important prerequisite for making 
effective recommendations of a tactical nature  
aimed at solving the tasks of the investigator in an  
anti-corruption criminal case (Tarkan, 2021).

Another variant of legal sabotage can be  
expressed in illegal political, criminal and/or other 
pressure on representatives of the judiciary to make 
illegal decisions on the corruption case under their 
jurisdiction. A variant of procedural sabotage of 
corruption cases is expressed by overly centralised  
law enforcement structures that concentrate  
authority over all components of the legal order, 
from minor offences to crimes against humanity and 
national security. Such structures are characterised 
by unreasonably broad powers without clearly 
and exhaustively defined limits, without scientific 
justification of both the scope and content of such 
powers. Such structures included, for example, the 
Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, the current 
Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. 
The downside of an overly strong executive, however, 
is that political leaders may abuse their power to  
prevent innovation that might threaten their power,  
or to enrich themselves rather than implement  
effective reforms, and possibly, in the long run, to 
perpetuate their power. In other words, an overly 

strong executive can drift towards autocracy,  
generating corruption at the expense of innovation 
and thus weakening a nation's prosperity (Aghion, 
Antonin, Bunel, 2021). Understanding these  
patterns of distortion of administrative procedures 
in the sphere of law enforcement presupposes the  
creation of specialised courts, law enforcement  
agencies and other bodies that naturally balance 
and/or control each other, compete with each other 
in matters of public recognition, citizens' trust, 
efficiency, demonstration of their own uniqueness and 
irreplaceability and/or the virtue of their employees. 
According to this logic, countries with serious 
corruption problems create specialised anti-corruption 
agencies, bureaus, prosecutors' offices and courts.

The development of dysfunctional justice systems, 
which reveal an ontology of corruption, requires 
the support of the judicial bodies of nations free 
of corruption and fruitful cooperation in this field, 
in accordance with the norms of international law, 
updating the relevant scientific conceptualisation. 
Systemic bias is usually understood to occur  
whenever a system or institution consistently  
produces outcomes that favour one group or set 
of individuals over others. These products may 
include beliefs and judgments. Thus, a legal system is  
systemically biased if it produces legal judgments  
that favour corrupt individuals over honest ones. 
A financial system is one that consistently produces 
financial judgments that do the same. It is well known 
that liberal democracies and their institutions are 
riddled with systemic bias – what can be called 
institutional bias. Institutional bias is best thought 
of as corruption – a rot that eats away at institutions  
and produces unjust outcomes. It is not too difficult  
to spot, but it is difficult to stop – because those who 
benefit from these systems tend to be those in power. 
But there is another kind of systemic bias that lies  
further beneath the surface and is correspondingly 
harder to expose. This kind of bias operates not at 
the level of institutional systems but at the level of  
conceptual systems. It comes in various forms, but 
since it involves or is the result of a kind of systemic 
bias, and bias of this kind is a kind of corruption,  
I will call it epistemic corruption. A conceptual  
system is epistemically corrupt when its concepts 
are consistently used to produce unjustified and  
false judgments on a range of issues that favour 
one group of people over another. So understood,  
epistemic corruption is an element in other forms 
of systemic corruption, because it operates at the 
level of how people think, and how people think 
affects how they act. The corruption of institutional 
bias is a consequence of epistemic corruption  
(The Epistemology of Democracy, 2023).

The anthropologically determined international 
character of law presupposes the unity of States and 



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peoples, their economies, cultures and ideologies.  
The same nature of a person makes it possible  
to achieve the same legal result everywhere, 
in particular the primacy and affirmation of 
human virtues over vices in legal and other social  
practices. The creation and reproduction of 
culture requires novelty, creativity, and a sense of  
biological mortality through the transmission  
of an idea into an imagined future. Cultural  
objects and forms also imply destruction and 
the fragile energetic limits of both humanity 
and the objects it creates. The desire for an 
experience free from the utility of survival, through  
the "non-productive expenditure of energy", appears 
in the impulse to represent a thought, an idea or an 
experience to other bodies and to make it manifest  
in the world, separate from one's own agency, in  
other words, the impulse towards timelessness,  
exists in the birth of art (Stapleton, 2022).

7. Conclusions
Therefore, the effective elimination of the  

dominance of human vices by means of legislation and 
law enforcement practices becomes effective when 
reproducible knowledge reflects awareness of the 
entire complex of nurturing issues, the manifestation 
of good virtues and their suppression. Otherwise,  
both economic reproduction and economic progress  
are excluded. For Ukraine, these two processes 
now depend on the understanding of the respective 
progressive solutions guided by the highly  
developed nations of the EU. In fact, integration into 
it is historically determined and currently historically 
inevitable, and therefore requires meaningful  
dynamic transformations of domestic legislation. 
The most urgent direction of these transformations  
requires interdisciplinary knowledge related to 
the fight against corruption and its minimisation. 
The epistemological context of the creation and  
application of anti-corruption legal norms consists 
of scientifically proven, comprehensive knowledge 
about the mechanism of neutralisation of corruption 
by means of coercion, encouragement, etc. This 
knowledge is characterised by its subject and  
content. This knowledge is characterised by its  
subject and content, the information about which 
enables a correct understanding and explanation  
of this subject. The subject of knowledge is virtue, 
guaranteed by law. The widening and deepening of 
knowledge necessarily involves a transition from 
abstract to concrete thinking, a comparative approach 
to the study of the acceptable experience of nations 
that have successfully neutralised corrupt distortions  
of the legal content of social relations. The 
implementation of the financial responsibility of the 
labour collective for the unscrupulous actions of its 

members and the fulfilment of the other innovative 
solutions in the field of judicial mechanisms of  
anti-corruption policy appear in the national legal 
space through the harmonisation of all its constructive 
components (concepts, axiological values, etc.).

Incentives and other incentives to neutralise 
corruption supplement the tort norms of the anti-
corruption legal mechanism. The methodology of 
obtaining knowledge about the above-mentioned 
subject understood by human consciousness involves 
the use of logical resources, namely 1) rational 
conclusions of formal logic; 2) contradictions and 
patterns of dialectical logic; 3) facts of historical  
logic; 4) artefacts of the logic of art. The truth of 
knowledge, verified by these means of reasoning and 
empirical experience, is then expressed partly by 
mathematical and linguistic symbols and partly in an 
intuitive way. The understanding of that which does 
not fit into the forms of words and numbers takes  
place mentally and sensitively. At this point, the 
praxeological dimension of pure epistemology  
requires taking into account the characteristics of 
the cognitive subjects of a specific social community, 
which brings one into the sphere of responsibility  
of its historical determinants. The teleological  
attitudes of the Ukrainian nation involve the study 
of the values and traditions of European nations that  
have united to ensure their economic well-being. 
Integration into the EU requires knowledge of how  
to combat human flaws, eliminate corruption 
distortions, and use human virtues in its structures.

Regional civilisational stratification persists due 
to both intra-national and international disho-
nesty. Accordingly, global integration based on  
fundamentally unified legal standards requires the 
elimination of counterproductive factors at both 
levels of social communication. The focus of attention 
on good virtues is determined differently from 
the existing configuration of national associations. 
Economic and other issues of cultural heritage are  
first a consequence and then the cause of the 
manifestation of good virtues. Simultaneously,  
military alliances confirm the deep ideological 
contradictions between nations. This shows the  
denial of the possibility of creating a global union of 
nations based on the manifestation in legal reality 
of the good virtues of its members. Nations and  
their associations in the modern world are formed  
on the basis of the manifestation of the degree of  
legal virtue. Accordingly, the question of the  
mechanism of unification of nations based on the 
achievements in the field of real manifestations of 
good virtues and the rule of law, their succession  
from generation to generation, their role in the 
capitalisation of economic relations and ensuring 
their sustainable development is a good perspective  
for further research.



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Received on: 02th of October, 2023
Accepted on: 23th of November, 2023
Published on: 28th of December, 2023