On August 21, the Verkhovna Rada unanimously (with 231 votes) adopted Bill No. 11533, restricting access to some of the open data in state registers for the duration of martial law and a year after it is lifted. The journalist community and anti-corruption organizations warn that the restriction on information outlined in the bill are too wide and will interfere with exposing corruption.

The bill will temporarily close off access to data on the location of real estate objects, as well as to the cadastral numbers of land plots owned by legal entities while martial law is in effect. “Keeping all state registers open is the correct policy in peacetime, as it promotes transparency. But in wartime, such openness creates danger,” the explanatory note says.

Bihus.Info chief editor Maksym Opanasenko said in a comment to IMI that introducing the restrictions would make the process less convenient, slower, and somewhat more costly (getting documents from the Administrative Service Centers is more expensive than extracts from the Diya app. — Ed.). “But overall, the situation doesn’t look critical yet. However, there is also no point to what the MPs did, but they refused to hear any arguments,” Maksym Opanasenko explained.

The head of the Anti-Corruption Center MEZHA, Martyna Bohuslavets, noted in a Facebook post that the only problem with the bill being adoptes is that it will now be easier for heads of law enforcement agencies to persecute any journalist or activist who exposes corruption. “Imagine: they are now restricting our access to data on the real estate owned by all legal entities. Not just by military facilities,” Bohuslavets wrote.

She added that often property obtained through corrpution is registered as property of a legal entity with ties to the official’s immediate circle. Now, she says, all this is done with restricted access for the public.

“The author of the bill is the servant Fris (Servant of the People MP Ihor Fris. — Ed.), who has been the subject of a BIHUS investigation that discovered a bunch of land plots registered as property of his daughter’s LLC. Now this is all being done with limited access for us,” the head of the Anti-Corruption Center MEZHA stressed.

The initiators of the bill (the Servant of the People MPs Ihor Fris, Serhiy Demchenko, and Volodymyr Vatras) claim that the amendments are needed to protect defense enterprises in wartimt while “not paralyzing the registers’ operation.” “We want to step up the security of the enterprises, while at the same time not paralyzing the registers’ operation. This decision is about the balance between openness and protectedness,” the explanatory note stresses.

The bill proposes:

  • to amend the Civil Code to allow legal entities to list not the address of their actual office, but any other address through which they may be officially contacted;
  • to amend the law on registration of legal entities to allow defense companies not to disclose all types of their work;
  • to restrict access to objects’ exact addresses in the property rights register for the duration of martial law;
  • to restrict access on some of the data in the land cadastre;
  • to restrict access to information on defense-related inventions in intellectual property registers.

The Institute of Mass Information warned back in March that adopting Bill No. 11533 in its current version would harm the public oversight sphere (journalists, human rights activists) and ordinary register users. According to IMI lawyer Volodymyr Zelenchuk, protecting defense facilities is being used as a pretext to essentially restrict access to data on the location of all real estate and cadastral numbers and to allow high-ranking law enforcers to obtain information about persons who have requested information from the registers, which creates risks of pressure on journalists. The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office also pointed this out in their conclusions to the draft bill. The attempt to put Bill No. 11533 to a vote on March 27, 2025, failed, as the Freedom of Speech Committee chair Yaroslav Yurchyshyn reported at the time, emphasizing the need for further amendments. Now the document has been adopted in its entirety.