KYIV, June 29 - Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a much-anticipated judicial reform, a move long sought by the West, AP reported.

The Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, voted to endorse a bill that sets up an independent panel to appoint judges. It includes a provision that gives international experts a decisive voice in selecting the nominees.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the bill's approval and promised to quickly sign it into law. He emphasized that the High Qualification Commission to be created to appoint judges would be formed in a way that would exclude any candidates tainted by corruption.

“The Verkhovna Rada has empowered a key instrument to ensure justice in the judicial system,” Zelenskyy said in a statement on Facebook.

Parliament on Tuesday also approved in a final reading a law to impose jail sentences on officials who make false asset declarations, a requirement set by the International Monetary Fund to secure lending under a $5 billion program, Reuters reported.

Lawmakers closed loopholes in the bill that would have allowed officials to avoid declaring the property of their relatives. Those loopholes had caused Zelenskiy to reject a previous version earlier this month.

Under the law, officials who do not submit asset declarations or fail to declare assets worth more than 4.2 million hryvnias (around $150,000) could face one year in jail.

International lenders have made fighting corruption a condition for future loans for Ukraine.

The new law is billed as a partial solution to problems that arose last October, when the Constitutional Court struck down some anti-corruption laws as excessive, including legislation allowing officials to be jailed for hiding their wealth.

That ruling had hobbled Ukraine's prospects of securing more IMF loans and prompted Zelenskiy to suspend the head of the court.

The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine welcomed the judicial reform legislation as “an important step forward toward comprehensive judicial reform.”

It said on Twitter that the U.S. stands ready to help Ukraine “realize this historic opportunity to renew Ukraine’s judicial system on behalf of the Ukrainian people.”

The U.S. and the EU long have pushed Ukraine to conduct a comprehensive judicial reform to uproot rampant corruption.

Zelenskiy was elected in 2019 on pledges to combat the country's endemic graft and end a war with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east that erupted after Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. (ap/rt/ez)